OOMPH

Bianca Barling, Sue Dodd, Tarryn Gill + Pilar Mata Dupont, Louise Paramor, Alex Martines Roe and The Wild Boys

Curated by Amita Kirpalani

16 February - 17 March 2007

Raunch as coined by Ariel Levy, is used to describe a fashion of promiscuity, excess and anti-intellectualism under the guise of knowledge, power and liberation through advertising and flaunting one’s own sexuality in terms of the stereotypical ‘girl’. Raunch is an aesthetic, relayed through fashion, politics, advertising, the music industry, art, magazines, television and movies which has seeped into culture so pervasively it forms a psychological epidemic. It is mainstream, it is everywhere and we expect it. Raunch reifies the system of sexuality which entraps both women and men in gendered stereotypes and promotes the fictionalised personae attached to them. 

Raunch culture is about putting on (and taking off) clothes as an attempt to seek liberation through embracing a stereotype of ‘sexiness’ and femininity, to critique it involves unpacking the stereotype within the artwork. The artists in Oomph engage with a critique of raunch culture via the long-standing female stereotype in literary and visual history, the hysteric, and in doing so satirise raunch culture. Bianca Barling, Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont and Louise Paramor’s reclining or posing and sedated idealised female subject, The Wild Boys and Sue Dodd’s manic imitations of music video clips, Alex Martinis Roe’s simulation of pole-dancing in the gallery, each embody different facets of the female as hysteric. (Amita Kirpalani, 2007)

Image: Louise Paramor, Classic Shazzy, 2005, gloss painted paper construction.