Dear Sylvia

Overview

From reclining nudes of the Renaissance era to 20th-century punk feminism, the female body has had a long and turbulent history in art. In 1975, Carolee Schneemann reclaimed the body by pulling a scroll from her vagina and reciting a feminist speech. It’s rare to see something this radical nowadays. However, there’s no single story that binds women together.

Dear Sylvia at the Australian Centre for Photography is a collection of works questioning the contemporary role of the female body. From documentary to conceptual photography, nine photomedia artists approach their subjects in different ways. Full of emotional and literal tangles, these distorted and displaced bodies resonate with the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It’s a sometimes bleak but important point of reference.

Some of the most striking portraits come from British artist Alma Haser’s Cosmic Surgery, a series of Cubist-inspired photographs. She folds faces into delicate origami and repositions them onto her female subjects. Their fractured features become a strange combination of alien and beautiful.

There’s a similar kind of manipulation at play in Julie Rrap’s video work, Castaway. Blending Marilyn Monroe and Gericault’s Raft of Medusa, it has an underlying sense of fatal femininity. As the figure lies tangled in a timber frame, still images slowly fade in and out like a watery cross-fade.

There is a real sensitivity to Jessica Tremp’s work. Her soft photographs appear inspired by a more romantic affinity with nature. In each work, the surrounding environment seems to creep onto raw skin, whether it be glistening green wilderness, the grainy tone of rock or the hungry darkness of night.

As is expected, the documentary photographs don’t have the same precise composition, but they contain more energy — the occasional blurriness captures a greater sense of urgency. A dynamic series from Flore-Ael Surun rallies together a group of activist women campaigning for peace in different corners of the globe. Entering the troubled world of Eastern Europe, Dana Popa presents Not Natasha, chronicling the sex trade in Romania. Many of these works have a coldness and a loneliness — a floral bedspread framed by pornography, a shelf full of religiously iconography, innocent teenagers and dejected women.

Evoking familiar themes such as nature, sacrifice, objectification and self-identity, this exhibition is a physical and emotional examination of what it means to be a woman. And as tragic a tale as Plath’s is, it is that of the modern woman: to be awake to the spectrum of opportunities and potential failures. In The Bell Jar, Plath writes about the multiple branches of a fig tree and the inability to choose which one: “I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing the rest."

Image: Marlous van der Sloot.