Aaaand I'm back! Kick-starting semester 2 with a mock grant application for overseas artist residency
Project description (limit 250 words):
As a part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2012, I've been collaborating
with a group of young Melbournian artists on an exhibition and performance
piece called 'Foreplay', which explores Melbourne's sex industry and the public
perception of sex work. I am currently creating a video piece which uses
documented interviews about privacy, intimacy, sex and the body with a variety
of people, and disrupts these themes through a use of audio dubbing, unexpected
video overlays and erratic cuts to the footage. Research into global sex trade
laws has inspired me to compare Australia's sexual culture with that of Asian
red-light districts, which are far less regulated than our own. In particular,
I've taken an interest in Bangkok's Soi Cowboy district, where I intend to
create a photographic sister work to 'Foreplay'. It's essential that the
artwork does not become an oversimplified shock-tactic that exploits
contentious sexual practice; this work will investigate intimacy and
experience, and use sex as a platform for realising another idea of absence,
and the empty spaces left over after an event has occurred. A residency in
Bangkok, Thailand, will allow me to photograph these vacant spaces in Soi
Cowboy, from outside of the usual context in which they are experienced. The
neatly folded bedsheets of a dodgy Thai hotel room, for example, or a bar
frequented by sex workers fully lit by fluorescent lighting. The final work
will combine moving and still images, which question, with subtlety and humility,
viewer assumptions, voyeuristic art and sexual clichés.
