Concrete Playground

 
 

    Susan O'Doherty: Perfect Woman

    When: Tuesday, 30 March - Saturday, 17 April
    Where: NG Art Gallery, 3 Little Queen St, Chippendale NSW 2006
    How much:

    Investigated in this show is the 'perfect woman' as a construct, both psychically and as an assemblage. Out of dissected dolls, furnishings, often-strange appliances and household products from the '40s, '50s and '60s, O'Doherty makes mordant visual puns: a set of scales as torso in The Perfect Weight, a light-bulb as a head in Bright Spark and the fairly self-evident Baby Machine.

    Such caustic obviousness is applied not so much to ideas of femininity generally, but to self-evaluation in relation to other women; in Roses and The Male Gaze bouquets of skewered Barbie heads represent a sense of rivalry and interchangeability as a basis for social relationships. Medical home remedies in the open cabinet-torso of Mother's Little Helper and cosmetics filling the equivalent shelves in Glory Box suggest that family life trains girls to view maturing as a sickness.

    Wear and tear on the figures, and flaking peach, teal and cream in the roughened but well-fitted wood-panel backdrops speak of exposure, but this critique is an 'inside job', domestic and anatomical. There is sympathetic irony as well as cruel absurdity to its literalisations.

    By Bethany Small

     
    Will You Be Attending?

    Susan O'Doherty: Perfect Woman

    -33.8869,151.2,NG Art Gallery,3 Little Queen St, Chippendale NSW 2006
     

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