All About Boys
Penticton Art Gallery
January 23, 2015 - March 15, 2015
All About Boys includes new and old drawings, video, photography and sculpture all exploring themes of intimacy, love and relationships.
I have long been interested in how our relationships, romantic or not shape who we are. All About Boys focuses on the universal theme of love and what that means to a young girl and later to a young woman.
We learn about love through our personal relationships, family history and popular culture. Our identities are constructed by how we relate to those around us and in turn how others relate to us.
Boyfriends Past presents portraits of my first five boyfriends. Each drawing is made from memory, accompanied by a small description of the duration and experience of each relationship. These drawings are meant to be viewed and read in chronological order from left to right.
For the photograph Sweet Love I dipped red roses into glucose. As the granddaughter of a baker I had seen my grandfather work with glucose and was transfixed by its seductive quality. It is a very slow moving substance that looks almost like molten glass. Sweet Love was inspired by the cultural language and clichés around love.
Boyfriend Material was inspired by the cultural phenomenon in Japan of men having long term relationships with large 'girlfriend' pillows. The pillow slips have printed images of female manga characters on them. These men regard their pillows as 'real' girlfriends, taking them out for dinner and traveling with them. Instead of an image my pillow has a list of attributes that would make up my perfect boyfriend. This is list was then hand-embroidered on the pillow case. Boyfriend Material was created for an exhibition in Tokyo, Japan.
The drawing Untitled(Dead Plants) was created as a sort of memento mori, reminding you that change, death, heartache and loss is inevitable.
The video Never Been This Close Before shows squid ink dropping into water while in the background I sing the Patsy Cline song "I fall to pieces". Squid use their ink in times of vulnerability. When in danger they expel ink to create a smoke screen or decoy in order to escape their predator.
Please visit the Penticton Art Gallery website for more information: