Exhibition
SHOW - Ingrid Berthon-Moine / Jessica Mallock - Macandi Showrooms
An exhibition of sculpture, video, photography and text works by Ingrid Berthon-Moine & Jessica Mallock, both recent graduates of the LCC MA in photography.
In some senses, photography has historically been inflicted upon women as the subject of photography, and with many of the conventions of photography having been developed by men. Ingrid Berthon-Moine & Jessica Mallock acknowledge their predecessors who counter such a position – Valie Export, Jo Spence, Sarah Lucas and Cindy Sherman - wrestling primarily masculine conventions from the grip of the mainstream to reapply them playfully to their own ends.
Berthon-Moine's interest lies in investigating sexuality and the body (male and female) as vehicles for a powerful contestation of the debate around sexual representation. She raucously upends conventions of representation to highlight absurdities, as in 'V', 2010, a set of photographs of men's (hairy) chests, all with v-neck or open shirts, which through their framing are remarkably suggestive of the female pubis. This merging of opposing signifiers collapses preconceptions and amounts to a humorous and brutal attack on prejudice.
Mallock - through considering photography itself as a material - makes similarly playful works in the form of sculpture. These fold investigations of the photographic space into the daily reality of domestic chores to make surprising, photographically spawned, objects. These sculptures associate some of the monumental gestures of art history found in minimalism with the more mundane domestic aspects of life: cleaning materials, chopping boards, and foil. The results work in and out of photographic illusion, in and out of two and three dimensions and in and out of the home and the gallery.
