In this curatorial project, I am looking at artwork that focuses on the body, but more specifically, on images of child bodies, and how they relate to our understandings of childhood. This exhibit explores how representations of children in our contemporary visual culture of fine art inform our conceptual understanding of children and childhood. How do images of the child affect our relationship to the child and image of the child? How do contemporary artists explore this concept in their artworks, and what are they telling us about children? The photographs in this exhibit explore probe the understanding of the social construction of childhood, attempting to re-write or re-construct this narrative of the stereotypical understanding of childhood.
My experience of our culture is that it is highly constructed by the influence of media. We are constantly saturated with hundreds of images daily, which seems to be out of our control, as we are conditioned to think and behave in certain ways. Even more intriguing, is that this applies to realms of our culture that we think are natural. In this case, I believe that the concept of childhood is an entirely constructed entity, created by the spreading idea of a universal child and childhood, which is predictable and programmed to act and occur in specific developmental ways. More specifically, what I have been finding as a student of art education is that most people find children to be locked in this limited space of innocence and naivety, when in fact children are not all predictable, and childhood is not a concept that can be defined and categorized universally into neat and tidy folds. The growth and development of children is erratic and perpetually becoming, not stable and predictable. What I find interesting now is the image of the child that our society has perpetuated, and what we have come to construct as being childhood. Mainly, the child is an innocent being that needs to be protected and controlled, and childhood is a time of happiness, ingenuous curiosity, and timelessness.
Anna Gaskell’s narrative portraits, Untitled 36 (Wonder) (1996) and Hunt (2008), allow the child’s body to be hung in time and space; showing the child’s lack of control over their own stories because of adult shaping. Similarly, Polixeni Papapetrou’s portrait The Wave Counter (2011) shows a child dressed in the costume of an aging adult. The child’s body is seen hunching, leaning into the wind, as if bracing time itself.
Tracey Moffatt uses her own life as a narrative, calling forth her personal memories in Scarred for Life II (1987), allowing the viewer a look into a more real child’s life, who is strained by the struggles of family life, just as Sally Mann depicts her own child in Fallen Child (1989), giving us a view of the child as one with Earth; an interesting new spin on the idea of childhood. Catherine Opie also uses a portrait of her child, in Oliver Wears a Tutu (2004), challenging the viewers idea of gender appropriate behavior.
Other artist’s, like Vee Speers, Loretta Lux, Pat Brassington, and Deborah Paauwe take a more chilling approach, with photographs of children that are almost haunting. Speers Untitled #32, from The birthday Party Series (2011) comments on the contradicting ideal of childhood s a happy time, as the child depicted stares intently at the viewer, with no expression of happiness. Lux’s portrait of Isabella (2000) is crafted to be foreboding in an inadvertent way. The head of Isabella is enlarged and her skin glazed over like a porcelain doll, with blue eyes open and ominous; the innocence in the portrait is so over exaggerated it is hauntingly beautiful. Brassington’s Space for Dreams #4 (2005) on the other hand has no particular portrait to it, as the face is turned away, evoking the ambiguity of both the body and environment. Similarly, Deborah Paauwe’s photograph Autumn Dusk (2004) presents an ambiguous portrait, but clearly presents a contradictory look at the innocence of child and adolescent, with a purposefully posed figure wearing red make-up.
Nicola Loder takes a similar yet different approach, by directly representing the child as a powerful being, through 175 portraits aligned and uniform in a grid, just as Rineke Dijkstra provides the viewer with a photograph of an upright child who is captured as fully aware and competent, even in the midst of “playing”.
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