FILM
It Hangs with Rattlesnakes and Rubbish
PLAY, BLINDSIDE
Review by Vanessa Gerrie
PLAY is BLINDSIDE gallery’s in-house and online video space, which dedicates itself to exhibiting experimental video art from local and international artists. For Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival, Alison Kubler guest-curates the space exhibiting multimedia artist Chantal Fraser’s 2013 work It Hangs with Rattlesnakes and Rubbish. The fusion of art and fashion come together in a work that comments on clothing and costume’s innate power and influence in how we look at identity and theories around women and dress.
One piece of clothing is used in the work as an object of costume that challenges cultural stereotypes in reference to traditional adornment. We as humans tend to project an identity and a narrative upon people based on their dress, and Chantal adventures to challenge this status quo. The ambiguously patterned scarf is draped around a female figure that stands stoically in a sublime landscape. It is a seemingly surreal setting that is entirely real; tall wind turbines stretch in the barren background below mountainous rock. This juxtaposed setting subverts our first expectation by surprising us and gaining our curiosity before we take a deeper look at the ramifications of our own projections.
The film is diced into silent segments. Each segment shoots the central figure from a different angle, the bit of cloth or scarf draped differently and dramatically around her body with every shift. The segments build up to a crescendo that involves the addition of sound, we hear the wind whipping at the women’s scarf making it cling and shift around her body. The image evokes the sublime however it also creates a mystery. Who is she? We never see her face fully; her identity is literally tied up in her dress. We make presumptions about what her cultural and racial background might be. We associate scarves with Middle Eastern women and their concealment, is this her identity? It could also be a brightly coloured lavalava, commonly worn by both men and women alike in the pacific islands. The fact is, we don’t know: there is no cultural specificity and that is the exact point. In manipulating this form of dress, Chantal dismantles traditional stereotypes we frequently and unconsciously try and place on people, particularly women.
The manipulation of dress to subvert the viewer’s expectation in Chantal’s piece reminds me of the way artist Shigeyuki Kihara often uses clothing in her work to rebuff audiences’ stereotypes of her gender and cultural identity.
It Hangs with Rattlesnakes and Rubbish alludes to this concept and is a poetic analysis of the viewer’s perception of race and gender through clothing and costume. It challenges us to think about why we are so judgemental when it comes to these everyday adornments and how clothing is so wrapped up in identity, whether that be cultural, racial or gender based. As Alison Kubler states, “It contains ideas that are gently embedded”, and it is up to us to unravel these and let them sit on our consciousness and question our everyday judgments and assumptions surrounding identity and clothing.
Check out Chantal’s beautiful work here or stop by BLINDSIDE gallery to see it in person in the curated space until 27 March 2016.
