This education kit was produced for the 2015 exhibition Loud! . It presents a selection of focus works from the exhibition along with issues for consideration for students in Years 7-12.
Click on an image for more information (including medium and dimensions) and to view the work in the Gallery collection.
Loud! presents photographs of women by women. Showcasing work from the Gallery’s photography collection, the exhibition features Australian and international artists Anne Zahalka, Miwa Yanagi, Yvonne Todd and Rosemary Laing. These artists challenge routine depictions of femininity. Their photographs possess comic potential yet also evoke the melancholic and macabre.
Each artist uses photography as a platform for fictive character studies and speculative narratives. They transform their subjects into agents of illusion. Here, the tension between a photograph’s claim to truth and its capacity to manipulate is teased apart. This preoccupation with performance and identity exposes femininity as a fabrication.
Recognising the role photography plays in shaping a collective feminine image, these artists undermine the aesthetics of mainstream media and expose the politics of its deceit. In doing so, they reinstate the authority and individuality of the female subject.
This exhibition coincides with the 40th anniversary of International Women’s Year, 1975.
Issues for consideration
Think about the title of this exhibition. Who or what is ‘loud’? The artists? The women in the photographs? The images themselves? Discuss how you think an audience will experience and react to these photographs.
The curator has noted that these photographs share a sense of the absurd. Identify characteristics in these images that help create this.
What is meant by a photograph’s claim to truth? How have these artists transformed their subjects into agents of illusion? Consider the characters they have chosen and the stories they are telling.
What are ‘routine depictions of beauty’? How do these artists challenge them? How is femininity fabricated? What role does the mainstream media play in this? List all the types of images of women you see in a typical day.
How did feminism challenge the status quo in the 1970s and what influence did it have on art practice? Research the key social and political issues of this period. Are these issues still current and relevant?
Anne Zahalka’s portraits of wax replicas of famous actresses expose the culture of deception that shapes the construction of female celebrity. These photographs confuse the distinction between body and object. Zahalka’s Nicole Kidman is flawless but also lifeless. Routinely lauded as a paragon of classic feminine beauty, in her waxen state she is nothing more than an illusion. The penetrating yet inert stare of this synthetic woman projects an uncanny sensibility and unsettles the iconography of the feminine ideal.
Issues for consideration
Find images of the ‘real’ Nicole Kidman. List words that describe these images. Compare the images to Anne Zahalka’s Nicole Kidman. Can you tell the difference between the actress and the wax replica? Why do you think Zahalka photographed the wax replica rather than the real person? What comment is she making about reality and celebrity? How is she questioning the feminine ideal?
Consider the choices the artist has made in presenting this image – the life-sized bust portrait, the saturated colour scheme of reds and blacks, and the dazzling spotlight. Research the characteristics of religious paintings and portraits of royalty. List the ways in which they convey feminie beauty and grace. Are there similarities between these works and Nicole Kidman?
Discuss the effect of the stare. How does it make you feel? What is the importance of eye contact and how can it be used to exercise power? Research the theory of the ‘gaze’ in art history, particularly in the representation of women in art. Analyse the significance of Zahalka’s work in this context.
Yvonne Todd’s photographs are portraits of exaggerated femininity. Her heavily embellished subjects are set against nondescript studio backdrops that both disorient and dramatise the stylised scenes. In Pipe study segments of the figure’s sequined gown have been digitally superimposed on her hands, neck and face. Reduced to little more than a veneered façade, she is as inanimate as the two beige pipes that stand alongside her. These pipes provoke subtle allusions to the female reproductive system and become surreal totems to an effaced and synthetically fabricated womanhood.
Issues for consideration
Evaluate the manipulation of formal elements and photographic devices in Pipe study. What do these elements achieve? Examine how Yvonne Todd plays with our subjective experiences and responses.
List the similarities and differences between Todd’s Self portrait as Christina Onassis and Anne Zahalka’s Nicole Kidman. Is one more melancholic? More macabre? What do the images tell us about the two women? Research the life of Christina Onassis. Does Todd give the viewer any clues about the personality and mood of her subject?
Discuss the power and importance of the human face in our relationship with others and our world. Why are we so obsessed with our own image and our relationship to the past, present and future? Is this a recent phenomenon or an enduring universal one?
The near-identical female subjects in Rosemary Laing’s series a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes feign sorrow for the camera. These women are actresses hired by Laing and instructed to cry on cue. With faces distorted by grief, they pervert the archetypal image of the bubbly blonde bombshell. The streaked pink backdrop – an abstract image of accelerated motion – provides a pictorial analogue for the emotional vortex that consumes each figure. Like the anonymous chorus in a Greek tragedy, they lament the pain of others and share the burden of collective despair.
Issues for consideration
Describe the ‘archetypal image of the bubbly blonde bombshell’. Is this a media construct or is it based on reality? How does Laing pervert this image in her series? Are her ‘blondes’ individuals or do they blur into one?
In what way is Laing’s role like that of a director? Identify theatrical or filmic qualities in this photograph. Consider the way she has selected her subject and organised the image.
List words that describe the mood of this photograph. In what ways does colour add to the emotion of the work? Evaluate the use of lighting, scale and physical distance from the subject. What do these elements achieve? How does the title contrast with the extreme emotion of the image?
In her series My grandmothers, Miwa Yanagi invites young women (and some young men) to imagine themselves as old women. Each model inhabits their fantasy in elaborately staged photographic tableaux with the help of prosthetic make-up and digital post-production. They engineer fictional trajectories for their futures and demolish the stereotype of the passive and docile grandmother. These hypothetical character studies are augmented by the text piece that accompanies each photograph, which is written collaboratively by Yanagi and her subject.
Issues for consideration
Describe the stereotype of the ‘passive and docile grandmother’. How does Yanagi’s photograph challenge this? What comment is she making about age and the process of ageing? Why do you think she has focused on grandmothers rather than grandfathers?
What role does the text play in this work? Create a photographic self-portrait of yourself as a grandmother. What choices will you make as to how and where you will be portrayed? Write a text panel to accompany your photograph.
Consider the relationship of the subject to the camera and to you the viewer in this image. Would you classify this photograph as a portrait? What is the aim of a portrait? Does Yanagi’s photograph differ from this aim?