Friday, May 24, 2013

DOMESTIC SUPPLIANCE - PEZALOOM - exhibition review

Pezaloom ©

Pezaloom ©

Pezaloom ©

Pezaloom ©


There’s definitely a subtle sensuality and intimacy in many of the small, black and white photographs by Pezaloom currently being exhibited at Skin Gallery in Carlton. The presence of the phallus represented by the raised columns of the industrial smoke stacks and other apparently deserted buildings, with their dark and perhaps foreboding ambiance and striking absence of human presence, stand in contrast to the softer partial bodily images of a woman dressed in lace – her legs and stockings just there amidst the fabric or her body draped over the equally decorative, rattan, cane chair. Often she is there ingeniously – her legs and shoes the only subject matter or she is bent over in submissive pose all part of domestic suppliance in which prayer or quite consolation may be the only way out of the impasse, in which the struggle between what is considered good and clean and what is dirty collide.
As I looked at these photographs, the rough and dirty exterior of the dilapidated factories and buildings that were the vehicle of capitalist enterprise, some with their smoke stacks still spewing pollutants out into the air and the more human element; a woman, perhaps the artist’s mother, sister or  friend; I sensed a certain nostalgia as if the child (artist) had at some point caught a glimpse of a woman partially undressed and an erotic desire had begun. Some of the paraphernalia in the photographs suggested a particular era and an exacting kind of glamor we might associate with the 1940s or 1950s, Film Noir and the Hollywood factory system in which beauty was constructed and, that other kind of work place factory in which uniform things were made. However, the images of the woman in these photographs and her partial bodily parts are not glaringly exotic or erotic, indeed she appears all too normal in a domestic situation and the memory of an innocent  would not map (as I did) the notion of sexual fetishism on some of these photographs, particularly since the objects included were of things not usually considered as sexual in nature; but instead that innocence of remembrance is portrayed in a sense of purity displayed in the woman’s body. Domestic Suppliance is showing at Skin Gallery, corner of Drummond and Queensberry Streets, Carlton until 20 June. Opening hours are 9am to 5pm weekdays.  Domestic Suppliance was curated by Aliey Ball.

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