Lisa Tomasetti - Dana Kinter - Georgina Mills - Photography | Mixed media painting | Classical figurative sculpture - Friday 17 May - Saturday 8 June 2024

The Manifest: Clouding Our Binary Ideas of Gender

The word ‘manifest’ describes what a thing (a boat, a person, a vessel) may hold – its contents. Taking her cue from this definition, in her latest body of work, Lisa Tomasetti reflects on gender identity and the role contemporary photographic portraiture plays in the representation of the ‘female’ image. Does it capture or construct identity?

Through the constancy and indifference of clouds, Tomasetti responds to historic, costumed representations of ‘authentic’ gender. In the past, the ephemeral nature of clouds defied scientific classification. Artists saw them as anti-structure, anti-order and representative of the complexity of human mood or aspiration. Clouds were the transportation of gods and angels, signifying the intermediate world between the hidden and the visible.

The models’ historical costumes define them as hetero-normative, yet closer inspection reveals the costs of conformity and convention. The clothing and gender conventions they symbolise are restricting and restrictive. Through the lens of Tomasetti’s conceptual photographic vision, the models are depicted in the process of liberation from these constraints – ascendant, carried aloft by the clouds. Tomasetti’s subjects are unravelling, in an un-grounded escape from the restrictions of their gender-based impositions of ‘authentic’ gender. In some images, the model’s anguished face and painted hands mock the grace of her garments. Her feet have all but disappeared – robbed of locomotion. In other portraits, subjects are further buoyed aloft by balloons, which seem to drag them skyward. There is a sense that without these precarious vehicles of flight, they might fall to earth, or disappear altogether.

A new representation and possibility for an entirely individual identity is asserted in this series, one that seems to be as natural and free-formed as the clouds themselves. Each model celebrates the construction of their re-versioned female self in its emergent form, defying the constriction of their physical representations and challenging the historic classifications of their gender identity. Utopia and dystopia symbolically collide in transformative ecstasy. Manifest is a manifesto for new ways of capturing gender in photographic form.

The Stars Already Know Your Name

New paintings dreamt while following my heart in India, and my first woodblock kantha stitched quilts, handmade with love in Jaipur.

A gathering of experiences and motifs, of love and colour found while letting go and finding my feet across the ocean.  Dana Kinter, artist.

‘I filled the blood stained pages with the story of my love
and went on writing even when they cut off my hands.’

Mirza Ghalib

Ivana 

Ivana was Georgina’s first life-size sculpture as part of her 2nd year studies at the Florence Academy of Art, Italy. This sculpture reflects her immersion in the classical aesthetic throughout Italy, particularly Florence. Her cropping of the mouth was a deliberate inclusion in the project to mirror ancient sculptures fragmented by time. Ivana marks a pivotal point in the development of her technical skills. It also serves as a catalyst where Georgina started to realise the possibilities of this skill development and the many directions she could explore in the translation of her concepts.