ménage à trois
International Women's Day Exhibition
Dates Showing: February 19th - March 23rd, 2002
Belle de Jour
Marisa Portoiese
Hieronymous 1504-10
It Keeps Exploding in My Face
Don Simmons
The Company of Men
Ho Tam
This year's International Women's Day Exhibition marks a turning point at Eastern Edge Artist-Run Gallery. ménage à trois features three artists from across the country exploring issues of gender in audio, video, digital and photographic media.
The exhibition will reinvent the traditional feminist gallery space, pairing Marisa Portolese's series of photographic portraits of women of all ages, masquerading different roles, with the contrasting and complimentary work of two male artists. In the main gallery Portolose is "fascinated and obsessed with flaunting the feminine" while Ho Tam's video-still portraits of purposeful men dressed in business suits and moving through Japan's underground transit tunnels are "boxed" into the smaller Rogue gallery space. Don Simmon's audio piece mediates Tam's and Portolese's charged series with a modern version of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, where viewers can pick up any one or several of the speakers and listen to the sounds of sex.
As Portolese plays with the portrayal of women "as various iconic identities such as divas, sluts, goddesses and sexual ingenues," Tam attempts to "represent men with dignity and purpose", while exposing a repressive male experience. All the while, viewers are confronted with Simmon's video piece, "It keep's exploding in my face", two tv's talking to each other. One critic remarks, "Simmons targets the construction of romantic love...employing the high camp movie talk of the thirties and forties, he loops two tvs together playing the same segments - an overwrought speech on the combustibility of love...".
ménage à trois makes a progressive curatorial statement about the changing face of feminist discourse in contermporary visual art, while inviting viewers to confront themselves in the faces and voices negotiating the space.
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