Work in progress in the studio.
Artist
statement
Meghan Quigley
My practice concerns the mediation of images and the
contextualisation of women in nature, focusing on both the production values
behind images created in the media and the throw-away nature of the magazine. I
am interested in the language used in advertising: the artificiality of staged
performance, exaggeration of the mundane, hyperbolic gesture and the indulgence
of colour and romantic ideals, in order to create a sensory experience that
immerses the viewer. My interpretation of this becomes a recorded and
exaggerated parody or un-mediated response in the video work highlighting the
absurdity through repetition and exaggeration. Removing
the body becomes an exercise in removing the historic of women in nature;
traces of the body remain and lend a haunting quality. The viewer is free to
use the space to re-imagine the scene and be transported into the mysterious,
dream-like romance. In this way, I explore and critique
notions rooted in cultural perceptions of the body such as: landscape art
historically, the ‘muse,’ the male gaze, the unidentified gaze, post-feminism
and the human condition. Female
magazines fascinate me: you can flick through the material within five minutes
and be satisfied. Piles and piles begin to collect in doctor’s waiting rooms;
issues from December 1990 linger next to May 2012 - stacked and ready to be
thumbed through by the next patient. Or they are left absentmindedly on planes
or in train stations. They are dog-eared, ripped, pages that have captured the
reader’s imagination torn out, embossed with coffee cup stains, faces scribbled
over, items circled, phone numbers jotted onto the cover, set down and
forgotten. The images are absorbed quickly and disregarded just as quick; the
text is ignored, almost irrelevant in the wake of consuming as many images as
possible and yet the reader keeps flicking.
Despite
this, the expense and effort required to create one single page in a magazine
like Vogue is overwhelming, I wanted to try and understand the absurdity behind
the creation of these images that are destined to end up in the bin or
forgotten. By examining the process of engineering the images, i attempt to catalogue and
identity the visual code required to entice the viewer. It becomes largely a precise, perfunctory process, far removed from
the alluring, romantic imagery - post production will spend hours editing each individual
pixel on their screen, even the smallest and most mundane of plants hidden in
the background is given as much weight and attention as a model.
