Hurstville Museum & Gallery are set to launch a new photographic exhibition in the Dragon’s Lair Gallery that explores how established norms of femininity can be challenged and reinterpreted through unexpected materials.
The Dressed for Desire exhibition, a parody of women’s roles in heteronormative Australia, will officially open on Saturday 29 October 2022, and be on exhibition until 20 November 2022.
It features the latest body of work by internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary feminist artist, Lauren McCartney. The Dharawal Country/Wollongong resident, who was recently a Georges River Artist in Residence, created the still-life photography and video collection over two and a half years (2020-2022), primarily during the COVID lockdown.
Her work parodies objectification and conventions of appropriate female behaviour, creating situations where the female body is playfully exaggerated to the degree that it becomes a spectacle and an object of laughter. It simultaneously disrupts stereotypes and myths about femininity and misbehaviour.
Dressed for Desire explores the perceived guilt associated with the stillness of the female body in the domestic realm.
The artist reflects that, “I think it is absurd that public pressure on women is that we should be working our bodies and modifying our food consumption, to blossom into ‘improved’ physical versions of ourselves during the lockdown periods.”
