Archive News
Black Carnival - 14 Dec 2009
Cross-dressing youths in lace wedding dresses, rabbit ears and masquerade masks is just some of the imagery you can expect in Christine Webster’s thought-provoking Black Carnival exhibition, opening at Tauranga Art Gallery on Saturday 19 December. It is now over a decade since Black Carnival was made and exhibited to an undercurrent of shock.
Black Carnival deals with masquerade, fantasy, sexual desire, gender exchange, ambiguity and darkness, and the various veneers, or guises that each of us wear. Or perhaps aspire to.
As curator Penelope Jackson explains, the carnival aspect relates to medieval carnivals in which participants cross-dressed and dressed as wild beats, made even more dramatic by the intense use of black.
Webster’s installation comprises 60 linear metres of life-sized photographs, originally captured in Dunedin, between 1991 and 1993. Each of the ten figures she used as models, herself included, is larger than life and set against a backdrop of black or crimson velvet, conjuring up images of a 1930s travelling circus or vaudeville act.
The models continuously change their sexuality and identity, staring blatantly back from their stage as though daring the viewer, or voyeur, to walk past.
Black Carnival contains nudity, a subject that until the 20th century was out of bounds for female art students – unless they were the model. This exhibition flouts the subject. Not only has Webster called on male and female models equally, she has done it on a grand scale, offering us both sides of the subject for consideration – decent nudity we are often too inhibited to show, and the more risqué element of our alter-ego.
Webster took inspiration for Black Carnival from wall friezes found at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, painted around 60 AD. The frescoes depict the rites of passage on becoming a woman, and the ritual of marriage, which she alludes to in bridal outfits, yet challenges our ideas on identity and gender by using them on a male model.
Black Carnival is a thought-provoking work, full of drama. Its up to the viewer as to whether they join in the carnival or not.
Curator Penelope Jackson will give a floortalk on the Black Carnival and Gifted exhibitions at 11am, Saturday 19 December.
© 2009