Two Exhibitions at MOP

Overview

Monika Behrens and Rochelle Hayley have brought out their best watercolour brushes for Bedknobs and Broomsticks series, and produced a set of finely detailed scientific illustrations of various flora, fauna and, um, sex toys. The plants and animals are elements of rituals and medicines used by wise women and in witchcraft; the dildos are there in reference to a possibly apocryphal claim that certain preparations were applied internally, using, um, aids to that. By depicting the artificial phallus on the same ground as the supplies a female healer would have had recourse to, Behrens and Hayley also make a neat point about the way womens' knowledge has been treated in this area: that it's either not taken seriously (it is kind of hard not to giggle at the meticulous rendering of some of these luridly-coloured devices) or perceived as a threat (they're witches! Witches!). Women healers threaten masculine ascendancy either by appropriating or providing a counter-tradition for treatment of the body and womens' sexuality does a pretty similar thing.

The threat of the feminine is also central to Tim Schultz's Schultztown pictures. These are big, confronting nudes, grotesques whose bodies are pallidly degenerate and alien-seeming or robust to the point of animality. His two modes can be roughly described as Tim Burton doing Classical French portraits or Caravaggio painting villains from Disney films, both representing a strategy of containment of the erotic feminine and perversion of it to specific expressive ends. The titles and prices painted onto the gallery walls are suggesting what one of these might be and flipping the already foetid unwholesomeness of the chaotic salon hang into a camp critique.

Image: Tim Schultz, The Piper, 2006