Artist Statement: "A Special Variety of Soft-Skinned Dangerous Game” is a series of photographs and video that has developed from an ongoing investigation into camouflage, performativity and the grotesque. My particular interest in camouflage is where art, fashion and warfare overlap, its formal properties and social function. This work is visually aggressive, humorous and sexual. It utilizes visual tactics of camouflage and disguise to rewrite the skins surface in order to exaggerate the process of identification through the psychology of vision. The “Gagaesque” protagonist looks out from a body that desires the viewer’s gaze, from a complicated ever changing, non-classical body that is in the process of understanding its own parameters. The two-in-one body that is represented mimics one of the fundamental tendencies of grotesque imagery, that is it exceeds its own limits. She goes further than her own meatiness; she gives birth to herself over and over again!
Artist Bio: Jemima Wyman is a contemporary artist who lives and works between Brisbane and Los Angeles.
Wyman's art practice incorporates various mediums, including installation, video, performance, photography, and painting. Her most recent artworks utilize these mediums to specifically focus on visual-based resistance strategies employed within contemporary 'irregular military,' in an aim to explore the formal and psychological potentiality of camouflage in reference to collective identity.
In 2007, Wyman graduated with an MFA with an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, made possible with the support of a Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship.
Jemima is represented by Milani Gallery and has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally. Past exhibitions were held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Plimsoll Gallery (Hobart), Westbeth Gallery Kozuka (Japan), 40000 (Chicago), and Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery (Los Angeles). Her work was exhibited in 17th Biennial of Sydney - The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. Jemima recently completed a residency at The Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland.