Eye Love Exhibitions

Slideshows showing a few examples from two exhibitions for the Glasgay festival 2001 and 2003.

Hard Cheese
2001

Chesty Morgan...an emotional rollercoaster
2003

From the exhibition programme;

Chesty Morgan's ability to act in the films of Doris Wishman, and to cross over from cult cinema to an art cinema, from the lowest grind-house fare to the contemporary Fellini, makes her a unique talent whose charms can be thought of as solely based in her ability to express herself through the body. The fantastic corporeality of Chesty allows her to cut across the boundaries of taste and fantasy, cult and art. It isn't always clear what Chesty was trying to convey in her histrionic exaggerations, so it was my intention to provide a new interpretation out of the film's narrative context in order to transcend the limits originally imposed upon the film's emotional ranges.

The garishness of Chesty's make-up and exaggerated expressions are synonymous with the low budget experience associated with cult and exploitation film aesthetics; in which everything is exaggerated to compensate for being on the margins of the Hollywood mainstream.The subversion of taste and convention are symbolised in the excesses that underscore the kind of films and appeals that surround Chesty, and I wanted to capture this mode of excess and exaggerate it even further by ascribing emotional states and minds to the photographs. In this way I wish to challenge the 'natural' emotion of the dominant cinemas and celebrate it's origins in theatricality and performance based on 'look' rather than 'feel'; and challenging 'realist emotions' and the anodyne conventions of female beauty which mar both mainstream cinema and visual culture in general.

The exhibition also serves to celebrate the body, a particular cinematic body and in a more general sense, unconventional bodies. Bodies produced in the age of the perfect post-human imagined in magazines, sculpted by surgery and enhanced by computers and special effects. This exhibition is as much as a celebration of Chesty Morgan, as it is a hope that it will question our relationship to the body-beautiful, performance and emotion in visual culture.