"Body Bags: I am a Trash Bag"
Exhibition: Body Bags: “I am a Trash Bag”
Date: Wednesday, 28 July - Friday, 20 August 2010
Room: Mount Lawley, Building 8, Breathing Space
Artist: Catherine Gomersall
The series of colour photographic prints explore the “trash bag” as a metaphor for a particular category of emotion: “bad” ones. Emotion itself has largely been treated as bad, as trash, in Western philosophical tradition - emotion has been situated as opposite and inferior to thought: affect versus cognition, passion versus reason, feeling versus thinking. Yet, in the contemporary use of the word literal trash has come to signify the objects of consumer culture - discarded wrappers, plastic bottles, unwanted belongings. In the body bags, the jumbo sized black rubbish bag embodies its badness.
Catherine Gomersall is a visual artist mainly working in photography and has exhibited internationally. The artist takes up such topical contemporary themes as consumption and waste, and her works seek to investigate the disturbing aspects of psychological and emotional relationships with the everyday of material culture. This exhibition exemplifies a significant component of her practice-lead research methodological approach to a PhD in Communications. More of her visual works can be found at her website www.catherinegomersall.com
Contact
Catherine Gomersall
Telephone: (61 8) 9370 6496
Email: c.gomersall@ecu.edu.au