The Substitute 2007-8
My practice: I use the aesthetic tropes of advertising to critique the stereotypical gender representations that colonise commercial visual culture. Primarily this artwork is self-portraiture, but not in the traditional sense. In the work I create photographic substitutes. I examine the act of looking and being looked at to draw attention to the power relations of exhibitionism and voyeurism. By creating artwork that establishes me as an object it could be argued that I produce stereotypical images of the female body, but with apparent exhibitionism I create a substitute that renders my real body invisible. In each photograph it is the male subject who is being deceived because he appears to be satisfied in an embrace with a women who cannot reciprocate because she is only an image. The substitute is an idealised women who does not exist in the real world.
