Contemporary Australia: Women

97 Justine Khamara Australia b.1971 Maquette (detail) for Watch me slip through these thin sheets (detail) 2012 Mirrored panels, dye sublimated print on mattex 2 panels: 300 x 190cm (each) Installed dimensions variable Justine Khamara’s practice is concerned with the concept of photography. She takes to images with scissors and lasers, cutting and weaving them into collages and three-dimensional works. Khamara uses herself and her family as models, which enables her to work more intimately with her subjects and ask of them things she may otherwise avoid. In her works, Khamara regularly uses multiple images of the same person, often with slight variations, to create a single work. For Erysichthon’s ball 2010 she printed hundreds of images of her brother’s face and formed a collage of them into a gigantic sphere over two metres in height. Khamara’s interest lies in the tension between the image and the object, and this focus on the materiality of photography leads her to work in a more sculptural form. 2 In Untitled portrait 1 2007, she splices and assembles pictures of her brother so that the photographs become the building blocks for a three‑dimensional structure. This repetition within her works brings out analogies to reproduction — both biological and digital. Watchme slip through these thin sheets 2012 is made up of two free-standing, double-sided mirrors extending nearly two-metres high. Each mirror has a fleshy piece of fabric tumbling through an opening at the viewer’s eye height — closer inspection reveals facial features on the fabric. These faces belong to the artist and her mother, blurred by the folds of the fabric. The portraits are reflected within the mirror that they pass through, as well as in the one adjacent. The mirroring of these images — like Khamara’s other works — draws attention to the multiple selves that an individual inhabits. This is also alluded to in the title of the work that was inspired by a line in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931), which can be read either as the story of six characters or as the many facets of one character. In Watchme slip through these thin sheets , this reading of the self as being many‑faceted is facilitated by the presence of mother and daughter. To quote Hélène Cixous: ‘There is hidden and always ready in woman the source; the locus for the other. The mother, too, is a metaphor.’ 3 This is to say that woman is always more than herself; woman as mother can simultaneously be self and other. Where Watch me slip through these thin sheets differs from Khamara’s previous work is that the repetition is created through the use of a mirror rather than multiple images. Photography is always already a double; the portraits of mother and daughter are then repeated in the mirror that they are pouring through, as well as in the mirror that stands adjacent. Mirrors are often used to open up spaces, but in Khamara’s work they crumple the space in and on itself. The use of mirrors also brings the viewer into the work — not only by reflecting the image of the viewer, but also by doubling the role to be both viewer and viewed. The result is a cacophony of distorted faces bouncing between the mirrors. With such a prominent use of mirror it is hard not to at least touch on Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’. The proposition being that when a child sees itself in a mirror it is the first time they see themselves as a cohesive whole; prior to this they believe themselves to be a muddle of body parts. 4 Therefore, it is only through the mirror that the child is able to identify itself. Watch me slip through these thin sheets seems to buck against this theory — the mirror does not bring the fragmented self together, rather it refracts the whole into even more chaotic parts. Cixous posits this as something that is inherent to women: If there is a ‘propriety of woman,’ it is paradoxically her capacity to depropriate unselfishly: body without end . . . If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble . . . 5 The faces in Watch me slip through these thin sheets are blurred by the way the fabric ripples as it falls to the floor. By doing this, Khamara presents a portrait that is also simultaneously an abstract form. In this sense her work can be read in the surrealist vein. Dalí puts forward in his essay ‘The stinking ass’ (1930) the way in which the doubling process allows for simultaneity within a single work. He credits doubling with the ability ‘to systematise confusion’, which then discredits our general perception of reality. 6 Surrealist photographers were best able to explore this idea due to the multitude Justine Khamara Justine Khamara In one another we will never be lacking 1