Exhibition review Tradition, Cloth, Meaning: Contemporary Textiles Curated by Sara Lindsay
17 September - 7 October 1995
Long Gallery Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania
Exhibition review Home: Body
Pat Brassington, Kathryn Faludi, Mary Scott, Heather B Swann, Jennifer Spinks
21 September - 13 October 1995
Carnegie Room Town Hall Hobart, Tasmania
Polish born Krystyna Petryk has long been fascinated with portraiture and representations of the nude in photography. Her own investigations began in Warsaw by photographing her pregnant friends and continued after her arrival in Western Australia in 1982. Once here she broadened her explorations to include both male and female subjects before shifting to photograph and research representations of men exclusively.
During World War Two, the Australian government's Department of Information represented the male body in at least two distinct ways. The photographer Edward Cranstone photographed a heroically active, phallicised body and the cameraman Damien Parer filmed a heroically suffering abject body.
Masculinity continues its argument with itself, quizzical at its self-propelled self-assertion. But in asserting aggression the pain is not just experienced in the victim. For even in the crudest acts of coitus, for a moment, the raper becomes the raped, he is tied by his penis and his balls into an abomination.
Analysis of maleness from a semiotic approach in the context of the lifestyle magazine 'Good Weekend' published as a supplement to both The Age in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald.