Tamara Perrett
Jamison Zmood
Michelle Yuan Fitz-Gerald
MNEMOSYNE
“Whatever is imprinted we remember and know as long as its image lasts, but whatever is rubbed out or cannot be imprinted we forget and do not know."
Plato, Theaetetus
Art allows us the opportunity to create tangible, introspective records of valued and momentous experiences that fabricate our identities as humans.
We collectively use our practices to reclaim the spaces around us and space within ourselves.
The work in Mnemosyne contributes to a meaningful dialogue surrounding the vastness of diverse bodies and identities within a contemporary western culture, transforming immensely personal and intimate subject matter into commodities of cultural significance that require attentiveness and critical engagement.
We see the world from a postcolonial feminist viewpoint, reenacting autobiographical experiences to evoke an intimate encounter with diverging, yet congruent, artists.
Taking reference from historical female nude paintings, Tamara’s work in Mnemosyne, seeks to destabilise the prominent hetropatriarchal, Male Gaze by exemplifying the value of self-reflexive erotic art as a gesture of feminine empowerment. Her interdisciplinary work is an introspection of her identity as a queer, bisexual woman and the faculty of bodily decadence.
I am comfortable being vulnerable in my practice. An examination of my work will confirm that I externalise and transmute my experience of trauma into art. By this logic, it can be concluded that my practice protects me. It has become my voice.
Witnessing, the empathic presence of an Other who attends to my artistic testimony to affirm it as valid, is a key component in my work that facilitates self-healing. The presence of an audience is necessary, vital even.
When confronting painful situations that are out of our control, it can be argued that the work is less about catharsis, than sharing a difficult experience. By creating a moment that sears itself onto the consciousness of others; a shocking, or underdistanced moment, I want to share with my viewers what I’ve witnessed: an aching knowledge I have come by, the central core of a painful truth.
Mnemosyne was the personification of memory in Greek mythology, and Jamison’s work lends itself to a similar function. The work uses both photographs and family archives to build a sense of share memories and familiarity with an audience, along with a carefully composed arrangement of the work to intentionally evoke ideas of mess, clutter and density.
