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Imagine beautifully made 'body-size', cabinet-style constructions in light coloured wood with orifices, windows and draws replete with fascinating objects: fur, hair, seeds and 'windows' of back-lit, stretched, transparent kangaroo skin. In her recent exhibition Nicole Voevodin-Cash attempted to generate a 'synesthesial' experience for us, by bringing the senses together to create a sensorium of sight, smell, touch and hearing. One might reasonably wonder what the artist is attempting to achieve.
Voevodin-Cash suggests her main point of inquiry is the engendering of the body as a social construct. Here, the exhibition's title, hiatus refers to the gap between the sexes as a negotiable space. There is also the attempt to avoid sexist representations of gender and to explore a new space in order to discover an innovative iconography of the body: one that is constructed within a feminist framework. Voevodin-Cash attempts to find a new kind of representation for women (and men) not based on realistic images of the body. Rather, she seeks another aesthetic to represent, particularly female, bodily (and sometimes male) experience and knowledge that challenges cultural forms such as the nude. Traditionally, the nude defines women as passive and subordinate to the active male viewer.
The exhibition was set up as an interactive installation where people were invited to physically explore the works as opposed to the usual prohibition against touching art works. There is also the attempt to represent the subjectivity and experience of female bodies rather than represent the feminine in terms of realistic images.
The way the artist (admirably) attempts to achieve this is through the use of sensual, textured or tactile surfaces to represent the feel of bodies, or the use of objects to