Monika Tichacek is an installation artist based in Sydney. Her Romance installation saw Artspace transformed into a sterile white interior panelled with white plastic. The artist, swathed in white bed linen lay on a white platform as if reclining comfortably on a bed except that her head was transfixed by strings attached to four steel hooks piercing her upper lip and eyebrows. In a style reminiscent of David Cronenberg's films the figure appears as if post-surgery, complete with silicon-injected lips and eye-lift, simultaneously seductive and horrific. She says: 'A hidden camera records a close-up of my newly-enhanced face, which plays on a monitor next to me. The audience is not allowed to enter the room. A space too white, Too shiny.
Too sterile. Too unreal to be entered. It is a space that exists within fiction. Dreamlike. Perhaps the product of science fiction or a padded cell of a psychiatric clinic.'
In I wanna be loved by you, a performance/installation at Kudos Gallery in 2001 she lay in a white vinyl box with a clear peephole on top. 'Perhaps a display case. A coffin. A love-booth. Some kind of high-tech machine for a cryogenics experiment. The audience could look in on the sides and see my feet and the top of my head. Pinned to my head with hypodermic needlies, 25 m of long platinum blonde hair, lovingly adorned with red ribbons, flowed out of the box across the gallery floor. From inside the box Marilyn Monroe's "I wanna be loved by you" can be heard. Wearing 1950s-style starlet makeup and batting my false eyelashes I lipsynch the words, looking up at the audience above me.' Through the peephole the artist's face appeared magnified, distorted and fuzzy, moving in and out of focus, hinting of the less than perfect reality of the idealised feminine image. In both of these works the view of the human is mediated by a surveillance camera, echoing the receding of the surgically enhanced body from human towards post-human. Tichacek has been assisting Matthew Barney in his studio in New York this year.