Efface

Chelsea Lehmann, Fey (2016) oil on linen, 72 x 56cm

Upcoming exhibition at Strange Neighbour Gallery (Fitzroy, Melbourne).

exhibition details here

EFFACE:​

ERASE (A MARK) FROM A SURFACE.

​​MAKE ONESELF APPEAR INSIGNIFICANT OR INCONSPICUOUS.

In Efface, Luke Thurgate and Chelsea Lehmann present new paintings as well as a collaborative wall work in which they draw over each other’s paintings concealing both image and author. The audience is invited to erase these drawings for the duration of the exhibition to reveal the underlying figures. In the process of overwriting each other’s images of the body, the significations of gender, identity and chronology become fluid.

The interface between destruction and creation is self-evident in both lived experience and material culture. As we think new thoughts our bodies are decaying and renewing themselves and perception regenerates with these concurrent cycles. As new ideas and objects are produced, they begin to date; materially, culturally and politically, thereby inviting replacements and beginning sequences of transformation. Objects and ideologies are also deliberately covered, dismantled and destroyed, or replaced with others, in an effort to create a palpable sense of absence or to produce a significant change in meaning.

Effacement refers to the subterfuge of concealment, either through a depicted veil or as a painted layer imposed over, or erased from an image. To conceal invokes the conceptual presence of its binary—revelation. Disguise, camouflage and deceit are implicit in these actions; the possibility of revealing what is concealed inadvertently or against one’s will, increases the stakes of the image. Likewise, image destruction can be seen as a creative act by default, a form of re-signification in which the visual manifestation of damage or violent change can add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Lehmann and Thurgate orchestrate these binary tensions in their individual and collaborative artworks in order to reference ideas about the contemporary status of the body and its various structures of identification. Manifestations of sexuality—hetero/homo, male/female, art historical/contemporary, are cloaked, preventing recognition and problematising representation in order to point to the ‘impossible body’, i.e. a kind of body/face representation that denotes camouflage, flux or multiplicity.

In her book ‘Impossible Body’, Bojana Kunst responds to Paul Valéry’s 1946 essay, ‘Réflexions sur le corps.’ Kunst outlines Valéry’s claims that each person has at least three bodies in mind[1] (put simply: the experiential present body, the body that other’s see, and the tangible body of science and observation). Valéry goes on to propose a ‘fourth body,’ a new entity composed of the others but in effect different, called “the Real body or an identical Imaginary body”.

“The Fourth body is the real/imaginary body that always shakes the unity of each body and breaks every discourse about that unity. It is what is not but could be, nevertheless always somehow present in the images we have about the body, in our fears, in our desires and the speech we address our body and the bodies of others with.”[2]

The fourth body suggests a set of conditions that arise out of the challenge to straightforward or fixed interpretations of body identity, in which subjectivity affects constant change. This body is complicated and relational, contested and mutable. Images of the body and face are by nature seductive in the simplest sense: human beings are biologically invested in images of other human beings, no matter how separated those images are from what we know. The artifice of image making, the way in which history, the photographic lens, materiality, and erasure mediate, speaks to the agency of context and collective perceptions in readings the body. In Efface, the artists take pleasure in agitating these perceptions through the visual metaphors of concealment and erasure by drawing on their own experience of living inside a body and its particular set of relations.

Chelsea Lehmann, March 2016

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Kunst, Bojana. Summary of the book ‘Impossible Body’, (Ljubljana: Maska, 1999), Bojana Kunst website, accessed March 20, 2015, http://www2.arnes.si/~ljintima2/kunst/b-impossible_abstract.html

 

[2] ibid.