Jemima Wyman / On edge

by Jan Aird - KickArts Contemporary Arts
(Cairns QLD Australia)

Earthquake Girl by Jemima Wyman

KickArts, in conjunction with On Edge Contemporary Media and Performance Festival, presents 3 video works from Jemima Wyman (a contemporary video artist who lives and works between Brisbane and Los Angeles), which are currently screening in KickArts Gallery Two until 25 July.

Jemima has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally and her practice works across various mediums including installation, video, performance, photography and painting.

The 3 contemporary video works Combat Drag, Whak’emall and Earthquake Girl are a result of her research into ‘communal skins’ which aims to critique traditional notions of the classical body through imagery and ideology related to Liberation Armies.

It is the political dimension of imagining and or inhabiting a ‘communal skin’ that is the impetus of her practice as it raises the moral dimension of actions and decisions in relation to others.

A self-defined term, ‘communal skin/s’ relates to the social potential of camouflage (through pattern and fabric) as a transformative device to construct new understandings of subjectivity in relation to a collective body.

‘Communal skins’ are represented and produced through customised masks, large-scale pour paintings, embodied installations, live performances, wallpaper and video works.

Presented is imagery of fictional and real Liberation Armies that use masks, patterned fabric coverings and camouflage, as forms of resistance to protect and give power in combat.

The armies represented appear to have constructed their own skin out of the patterned fabric and masks. This metaphoric skin creates a uniform collective body, indiscriminate of geographic location or gender, also allowing members to see without being identified.

It is utilised in the works to exaggerate the interface between the inside and outside of the body, between the viewer and the viewed, the subject and the object.

The transformative potential of rewriting the skin’s surface, through use of patterned fabric and masks, is used to evade the current social order of defining different bodies as other.

This metaphoric skin allows Jemima to explore difference while avoiding the perpetuation of imagery that reiterates oppressive power relations by representing bodies outside of the dominant hegemony as exotic or debased.

Within this process of representing complex subjectivity, the viewer’s corporeal experience is also questioned through physiological effects built into the work; through aggressive optical patterning, lucid colours, humorous scenarios, violent actions, sexual titillation and nauseating sound.

These physiological effects, coupled with the deceptive quality of camouflage (that questions the reliability of perception) aims to disorientate the viewer enough to psychologically charge their experience of the work, with the intention of resensitising their awareness.

This is a process where visual devices applied to the body have both a serious and humorous consequence in the world.