Kimberley Pace (WA)
Sister Satellite 22/6/18 - 13/7/18
Wangs. Penises. Dongs. Cocks. Dicks. Despite contemporary attempts of producing alternatives to the heteronormative male gaze, many of these are still heavily filtered through a colonial white centric lens. This lens works to reinforce homogenised ideologies, values and desires of the body. LET’S LOOK AT DICKS questions how we look at and handle the body through subverting the traditional westernised gendered roles of gaze and the body.
Dick/s as an object of desire are heavy, loaded and problematic in a way that nothing coded or understood as desirable on cisgendered women’s bodies are. While the most intimate sites of the body are often open game for public consumption, there is a real fear of dicks being present, in view, or handled as an intimate site of the body – erect or flaccid. They are the things we giggle at in adult shops, they are excluded from nude scenes in movies, censored in art galleries and they are simply too much in a way that the saturated idea and image of cis women’s intimate bodies are not.
Reframing gaze for this exhibition isn’t an exercise in attempting to rewrite heteronomative white centric western gaze by looking at cis women’s bodies or desires. Instead let’s look at what we ignore, shy away from and hide from public view – the sites of body that are too taboo to deal with.
Throughout the exhibition dicks are reimagined as an object, merging an idea of the real body with the imaginary. Gaze is framed directly through image, and video work, borrowing from pornographic framing of the body to fragment and reduce the body, exposing dicks to a treatment seldom represented. The work is a merging of garment, textiles, sculpture, video and images, which form new understandings and imaginings of the body, our taboos, desires and how we look at things.
Lets look at dicks.
Kimberley Pace (b. 1984) is an artist from Perth, Western Australia. After graduating from Edith Cowan University in 2011, completing a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts with a double major in Visual Arts and Contemporary Fashion, she completed a Masters of Arts by Research degree in 2015 at the same university. Kimberley has exhibited regularly since 2009 and participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including the most recent solo exhibitions Sticky Surfaces at Seventh Gallery in Melbourne, Pulp | Made in Taiwan at Spectrum Project Space in Perth, WA, Hard Bodies at Sawtooth ARI in Launceston and a collaborative exhibition Double Helix at Blindside ARI. Kimberley’s practice investigates the fluidness of the corporeal body explored through a multidisciplinary studio approach involving garment, object, ceramics body, performance, video and sound. Finding that the body is unfixed, permeable and penetrable, Kimberley explores how the viewer’s gaze contributes to these ambiguous thresholds of the body. She asks, how do the un-definable margins of the body simultaneously entice and repel us?
Images by Grace Marlow and Kimberley Pace.
Public Programming
In Conversation: Kimberley Pace with Julia Robinson
Saturday 23 June 2pm.
Join Sister at Holy Rollers Studios for Kimberley Pace (WA) in conversation with Julia Robinson (SA). Kimberley and Julia will flesh out the themes and making practices involved in Kimberley's exhibition 'LET'S LOOK AT DICKS : (an attempt at) Reframing gaze'.
