Lauren McCartney, Sequence
Perth Centre for Photography is pleased to announce Sequence by Lauren McCartney.
Lauren McCartney’s Sequence is a performance in which she stretches her body, in an attempt to split her legs. This excruciating task draws from the notion that in Western culture, we are told from childhood that a woman’s value is in her physique. It is expected that women must endure violence to our bodies and minds to create and maintain conventional beauty norms, which in turn makes this suffering easy to accept and even familiar and comforting to endure.
This act is somewhat achievable; however, the process is slow, painful and violent. McCartney physically splits her body in half as she sinks into the ground, in both an absurd and heroic act to breakdown feminine behavioural, social and beauty norms that are essential to patriarchal power.
Lauren McCartney is a multidisciplinary feminist artist who is based in Dharawal Country/Wollongong, New South Wales. Her work parodies objectification and conventions of appropriate female behaviour. She creates situations where her body is humorously exaggerated to the degree that she becomes a spectacle and an object of laughter, whilst simultaneously disrupting stereotypes and myths about femininity and misbehaviour. McCartney’s practice offers the concept that through failing with her materials and her body, she succeeds in creating her work.
McCartney holds a PhD (2018) through Curtin University and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (2010) (Honours Class I) from the University of Wollongong. Her work has been collected by the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She has exhibited her work, attended residencies and participated in presentations on her practice both nationally and internationally.
Sequence on Nightworks runs Wednesday to Friday evenings, from Friday, 19 February 2021.
NIGHTWORKS
An open call for non-narrative videos, photographic slideshows, and stories to be presented on the NIGHTWORKS screen.
This is an opportunity for artists to share their work with a new after-hours audience within the Perth CBD.
There will be is no cost for PCP Members to exhibit, and all artists will be supported with promotion and an opening event.
To be eligible for the selection, you must be a PCP member. Not a member? Become one now!
All works will be screened Wednesday to Friday evenings for a six-week period.
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