iCandy, Spidergirl and Aesthetic Disruption

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Video/sound works and still images

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The female gaze has existed in Western popular culture as a device of desire, control, and exploitation that has effectively been a primary tool of heteronormative power, fuelled by the economies of masculinity and religiously sanctioned traditions.

 

In the mid to late-twentieth century, advertising companies, for example, knew that they could sell more cars to men if the images were inclusive of beautiful, young, scantily dressed, buxom women and the bigger the bust, the more cars could be sold and so forth.

 

This, of course, is one small example of a very big practice, yet what would happen if this kind of aesthetic model were disrupted through the guise of the grotesque and the female gaze was subsequently transformed into a mutated corporeal state?

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Drawing on my childhood memories of soft porn calendars which regularly adorned my parent’s kitchen wall in Far North Queensland, I have reconfigured a metamodernist framework through my critical practice which establishes an oscillation between the desires of the female gaze and the disruption of transfiguration. It raises questions, on the one hand, about the economies of aesthetic desire in terms of our acceptance of what is and what is not ‘normal’ – that is to say, can a woman, for example, with no arms and three legs still be as beautiful as a woman with two arms and two legs? – while on the other, explores how, over time, our memories of normative desire aesthetics can change and corrupt the way we recall beauty and from this, the prejudices over time that oscillate our own acceptances of desire and beauty.