Communal Skins
Artist talk: Jemima Wyman
Wednesday 4 August 2010, 6pm
The Physics Room
FREE

Jemima Wyman is a contemporary artist who lives and works between Brisbane and Los Angeles. Wyman’s practice focuses on themes of identity, resistance, fear, disguise and liberation and incorporates various mediums including installation, video, performance, photography and painting. Her most recent artworks utilise these mediums to specifically focus on visual resistance strategies employed within contemporary ‘irregular military’, in order to explore the formal and psychological potentiality of camouflage in reference to collective identity.

Wyman uses camouflage to address what she refers to as ‘communal skins’—the term she uses to describe the way guerrilla armies dress identically in disguises that hide gender, identity and deflect the gaze of the law. The use of camouflage also dissects the idea of the ‘Other’ in its various forms—race, gender and sexuality.

By appealing to the idea of a ‘skin’, Wyman questions the idea of identity and the body as something that is fixed, emphasising the dependence and obsession we have as a culture on external experience. Wyman exaggerates colour and dress, and her cinematic techniques create a dark and ironic version of guerrilla footage, yet the work is also subversive and threatening as a combination of jarring editing and warped sound creates a disconcerting experience for the viewer.

In 2007, Wyman graduated with a MFA from California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles made possible with the support of an Anne & Gordon Samstag Scholarship. Jemima is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane and has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally. Past exhibitions were held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart; Westbeth Gallery Kozuka, Japan; 40000, Chicago; and Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work is currently being exhibited in The 17th Biennale of Sydney—The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age.

Jemima Wyman is currently the Elam International Artist in Residence at The University of Auckland.

For further information about Jemima Wyman please visit: jemimawyman.wordpress.com

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