GIRL GANG MANIFESTO
Installation of painted banners, fabric structures and interactive projection.2019
This work is part of the ongoing Vide Magmas project, an imaginary girl gang of six characters, each a refracted piece of the artists identity. Girl Gang Manifesto was the final installation and thesis for my Masters of Fine Art completed at RMIT University. The installation features three fabric, constructed and painted banners titled ‘Personal Stuffing’ that contemplate the way in which identity in a capitalist society is firmly based in a relationship with objects. These banners are positioned in a triangle configuration, interspersed between another work titled ‘Pink Pavillion’ and a partial slice of pink background formed out of a painted floor and fabric wall. The gauzy fabric of the three banners overalys the imaginary world of the gang on the physical space, allowing the viewer to walk between the layers of foreground and background.
‘Pink Pavillion’ is an interactive projection overlayed on a partially walled fabric pavillion, where the viewer can walk another of the characters through an endless pink expanse with a game controller. It is an upturned rendering of a game, empty of purpose. Objects, characters and small looped animations generate at random in the expanse as the character walks at a permenantly flaneurise pace. This aimless game invites the viewer to be part of the girl gang, but without any goals the installaion remains a slippery, gauzy overlay that hangs on the edge of a fully formed narrative.
Vide Magmas are a compartmentalised depiction of self, Gemma’s own identity library, each a facet of a whole. Riffing on the pop-culture ideal of the social media age ‘girl-gang’, this is in contrast a ‘girl-gang’ of one, where Gemma, tounge-in-cheek, keeps her own company. Vide Magmas was created with an interest in the consequences of a growing merge between the digital realm and the physical. This project possesses a curiosity about the effect of this on the mechanics of identity. It has become a world building project that transforms Gemma’s identity into a sort of simulation in constant process, contemplating the possibilities that lie in the subconscious parts of the self, in the imaginary and in the science fiction. A virtual manifestation of identity that reflects the real and artificial back and forth until the boundary between is blurred.
