Trance of the swanky lump
Jay Younger's latest installation engages issues which were foregrounded for the artist during her recent residency in Manila. Specifically, the divide between those who 'have' and the majority who 'have not'. Cycles of oppression and advantage are passed down through families and cultural groupings, and are slow to change. How then do we escape the inevitability of class, gender and global inequities? Some women have escaped economic dependence, only to become enmeshed within the corporate system. In this exhibition Younger questions 'the evolving roles of women in the patriarchal corporate world in relation to notions of commodity and sexual fetish.'[1]
The viewer is given the first clue to this exhibition in the virtual work, projected live, on a video monitor in the Brisbane City Hall Foyer. It is a surveillance image, a calculated seduction. Music pulsates enticingly from the gallery below. I descend the spiral staircase into a dusky hot pink flush. An unexpected flash of movement captures my attention. There is another set of stairs to the left, blocked by a sign, 'emergency exit only'. I glimpse a figure in flight: a life size projection, female, sensuous, androgynous, disappearing around the corner.
In the centre of the gallery, guarded by four Samson-like pillars, spins a giant 'diamond', come disco-mirror-ball. It revolves hypnotically, strobing the room. A sleazy cabaret ambience transforms the City Hall basement. Occupying a centre of power, gallery and 'nightclub', the installation leaks beyond its boundaries: it resounds up the stairs, transmits into the foyer monitor and ruptures the perimeter of the gallery space with video projections.
The floor is alive with swarms of pink-glitter, stiletto shoes. They roar about on motorised wheels like miniature dodgems