Contemporary Australia: Women

93 Over the last fifteen years, Deborah Kelly has developed a high-profile public art practice using platforms many of us consider to belong to advertising media — flyers, billboards, public projections — as well as web‑based works shared through social media to enhance community participation in the discourses of the day. In this time, Kelly has also a maintained a distinct gallery practice based in collage and photomedia, including the works Beastliness 2011 and The Miracles 2012, which explore the production of meaning throughout history, and particularly contentious issues surrounding gender, sexuality and faith. The video work Beastliness is a vibrant, thumping bacchanalian fantasy that takes as many aesthetic cues from MTV as from the photomontage pioneer Hannah Höch, and other proponents of twentieth‑century Dada — though both influences express a passionate cultural critique in their own manner. Populated by uncanny amalgamations of insect and animal parts cut from science and nature journals, and fused with formidable long legs in high heels more traditionally seen in fashion magazines, Kelly’s mythical feminine hybrids are fantastic in every sense. The narrative begins with a woman waking from a dream in a strange universe. As unruly hair takes over her face, transforming her into a lavish werewolf, her singing lips become the viewer’s gateway to a world of frenzied dancing beasts. Gyrating to a rising soundtrack, the beasts couple and climax with sprays of floral pleasure. Feathers fly as the creatures consume each other in a post-coital conclusion resembling an ouroboros — the ancient symbol of a serpent consuming itself, representing the circle of life and, in some contexts, immortality. Kelly’s wild tale is reminiscent of the fifteenth-century tale of Guerino the Wretch, a knight drawn to the prophet enchantress Sibyl of the Apennines, and her castle, which appears to be a paradise overflowing with handsome youth with every talent, grace and luxury. In its true form, however, as is revealed once a week at midnight, the kingdom is revealed to be a demonic illusion, inhabited solely by serpents. Although Guerino eventually escapes, he soon returns, having reflected that pleasure is destined to involve moments of ‘hell’. 1 Kelly appears in sync with Guerino’s acceptance and understanding of balancing good times with more challenging episodes. Kelly’s chimeras are, in part, modelled on an interest in Donna Haraway’s germinal ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. Haraway’s 1985 essay outlines the opportunities for new technologies to undermine essentialist, imperialist structuring narratives. Kelly’s strategy, then, is to eschew the constraints of normative expectations, embracing diversity by re‑mythologising femininity and, literally, metamorphosing stable notions of gender. Haraway writes: By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs . . . In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between organism and machine has been a border war . . . The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. 2 Following suit, Kelly strives for a meaningful existence in her own egalitarian, voluptuous kingdom, celebrating enjoyment against a sea of moralising rhetoric that would seek to demonise difference, to divide and control. The Miracles represents a similar attempt to expand thinking about what constitutes a family. The work, a large installation of small glowing studio photographs, documents real families in which children have been Deborah Kelly Australia b.1962 Beastliness (stills) 2011 Digital animation shown as HD projection, DVD, 16:9, colour, sound, 3:17 mins, ed. 2/8 Deborah Kelly Deborah Kelly Where the love is