Jennifer Mehigan: Cesspool

CESSPOOL is a solo exhibition by the 2015 Chan-Davies Art Prize winner Jennifer Mehigan.

Organized by VADA – Visual Arts Development Association, CESSPOOL will take place at SHOPHOUSE 5.

CESSPOOL is an immersive presentation of digital and painted imagery conventionally associated with the feminine. In this show, form and flesh are replicated with abandon and often rendered indistinguishable. The images and their installation address what Mehigan describes as the “performance anxiety” of a queer femme aesthetic.

‘Femme’ and its association with cuteness and beauty is often perceived as excessive artifice next to the ‘neutral natural’ nature of masculinity. Mehigan’s works hone this uncomfortable facet of the feminine and push it to its edge. Digital files begin as recognisable bodies and forms (flowers, rocks, organs, bacteria) and are disintegrated into non-entities printed on fabric canvases. The result is a distilled aesthetic that is abstracted, unrecognisable yet somehow familiar, and capable of infinite reproduction.

Compounding these elements to the extreme and combining them with the trappings of the feminine (glitter, petals) and the grotesque (flies, worms) creates an uncomfortable excessiveness within the exhibition space that serves as a brand of violence unto itself, simultaneously rebeling and reclaiming both space and body. As Mehigan succintly adds, “It’s like being aware of the ‘drag’ element of femininity, and weaponising that, pushing it further, to the point that it’s ugly and appalling but cute and fun still.”