Curators: Liz Ashburn & Gary Carsley
Where’s Papa?
Parthenogenesis means ‘virgin birth’. Conceptually, it lies at the crux of civilisation and its manifold discontents, ravelling more recently in the guise of western moral and ethical judgement, than in its genesis in the Greek myth of Athena, born from the belly of Zeus. The curators of the exhibition Parthenogenesis, Liz Ashburn and Gary Carsley, set up a dialogue that is ostensibly concerned with seeking out antidotes to cultural hegemony by constructing two visual camps—the referential and the observational.
The referential camp is punctuated via a hit-list of New York centric artists—Barbara Kruger, Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman, cogent choices as each artist makes work that is concerned with the construction of identity within a media saturated world. In Kruger’s case this is through her co-option of the advertising rhetoric of ‘Condé Nast(y) Publications’. The overlay of pithy text onto carefully chosen found images ensures a visceral (re)occupation of the signs and codes that construct identity. Similarly, Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre and (sub)sequential ‘self’ is (re)informed through an occupation of mass media iconography. Keith Haring’s pop iconography creates aesthetic sensations from ideas central to the discourse on identity politics. This insistence on a self, constructed out of the fragments of desire, posits the self as an ‘original’, caught in a state of mimetic overlay.
The observational camp includes Australian, Canadian and Indian artists—each place of origin once dominated by colonialist rule, each now coalescing with Northern American power structures. The inclusion of the American Cary S. Leibowitz/Candyass makes for a sharp intersection into this assemblage.
The Sydney-based performance collective the King Pins, radically pump ’n‘ grind their identity as black American rappers complete with overly complacent young white girls