In 1992, Helen Moyes made a documentary 'The Back Yard Shed' which set out to look at the lives of a cross-section of Australian households through the phenomenon of the back-yard shed.
Exhibition review Tradition, Cloth, Meaning: Contemporary Textiles Curated by Sara Lindsay
17 September - 7 October 1995
Long Gallery Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania
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.
The images are selections from a body of work called flamingharlots@trashed, created by Sydney based photographer Natalie Lowrie. The images, digitally retouched photos of Natalie's circle of friends and acquaintances were exhibited at the Polymorph Gallery at Newtown.
Using illustrations from a technical manual of the 1940s `the author examines the working male figure in popular iconography focusing on masculine representation in the visual arts and its link to the means of production.
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.
Let's speak about nomads and farmers... The acrid vapours that fill the cast iron nooks and crannies by day: the trickles on metal that appear in my black and white slides each night like blood from a more visible crime: this evidence of the distillation of men: these signs are signs enough of the collapsing consequences of 'farming'.
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.