Untitled - video installation, 4 min loop, 2001  (Exhibited at First Site, Melbourne)

The room is dark, a deep red tinge to it.  The glow of red lights comes from behind the red satin material draped across all the walls.  Fans placed behind the material make it blow slowly against the lights so the room appears to throb.  The air is slightly perfumed and the temperature of the room is warm, slightly uncomfortable.  There is a video projector projecting images onto a wall of the room.  There are four speakers each in a different corner of the room.

The video is found footage of many different takes of someone being stabbed.  Each image is in extreme close up so you cannot see who is being stabbed, but because of the sounds that go with the images it is obvious that it is a woman being stabbed each time.  Each stab is punctuated with the sound of the attack.  The edits are all very fast, so a rhythm builds up, making the piece almost abstract.  Slowly each image starts to blur over a length of time, and further on, the slightly ghostly face of the woman being killed morphs into each shot.  The sound begins to change accordingly.  Eventually all the images have blurred so that no figures can be made out.  We are left with beautiful swirls of colour and the sound has become a melodic hum.

            The idea for the exhibition stemmed from my interest in what is sexual to us as a culture, and how this obsession in appearance above all else figures into this.  Although the obsession has extended to men as well, I was more interested in pointing my project towards women, as there is a more obvious history (political and otherwise) regarding women and their presentation as (sex) objects.  I felt that the sanitization of women by way of beauty products and being presented as ‘soft’ and ‘delicate’ was a form of social control where there is a need for women to be figures of cleanliness and artificiality.  Further to this, in the horror film there are often themes that suggest a fear of women’s bodies – menstruation, bodily fluids, and the banshee.  These are two separate parts of our culture that deal with the body in different ways and I was interested in the differences between them as well as the similarities.  In both these instances the female becomes sexualised, but the similarities are incongruous.  Can violence be sexy?  I created an environment that was sexual in a clichéd way (with the perfume, red satin, the flowing of the material) as well as sexual in a problematic way (the violence on the screen mixed with the deep red aesthetically pleasing blurred images of the video and the abstraction of these images so they are taken out of context from the rest of the film), to question these two realities.  In the end all representation feels manufactured and horrific.

Sound by Haima Marriot.