These are stills from videos I have been working on. It is my response to how women are encouraged to exercise in order to look better and fit in to society and it's unrealistic expectations of women. The work obscures the image of a woman doing sit ups by creating a mirrored reality/fantasy
about the work
In this video the viewer is presented with an image of a woman’s legs dressed in white tights, a white dress and red high heels, in a white surrounding which is reflected four times in a broken mirror. We can assume the figure is a woman and also seems to be doing an action, although the action is not immediately clear and is further confused by the sound of heavy breathing. It is an action which stops and starts and the more time goes on the louder the breathing until finally the legs fall and the action is interrupted.
This is a video of me doing sit ups filmed from the waist down. In the many videos filmed before this, the figure’s face is always shown or the clothes are different, but we always know that the woman is doing sit ups. I chose this video to show on it’s own as I feel of all my recent videos this one speaks more of what I am interested in and what I am researching. It has an ambiguity to the image and is also quite sexually suggestive with the action and the loud, heavy breathing. The red high heels are suggestive of a vamp, seductive woman that we so often see portrayed in film. Which leads to the reference to cinema.
I am interested in women’s portrayal in the media, and specifically to this piece- cinema. I have been researching film theory and in particular Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Mulvey introduced me to the term ‘scopophilia’ or pleasure in looking, which has greatly influenced how I think about cinema and media and how I look at things. Mulvey talks of extreme scopophilia in terms of peeping toms and perversion, but she also discusses the cinema as being a place of ‘voyeuristic fantasy’[1] where the darkness isolates the viewer allowing for pleasurable looking without guilt or shame.
“Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer.”[2]
It is with Mulvey’s text in mind that I have researched more contemporary mediated images of women. Images from advertising, televsion, magazines, internet. The ability for these scopophilic urges are more available than ever giving women more outlets to display the to-be-looked-at-ness,[3] which Mulvey also talks of. It seems we are objectfying ourselves more and more and conforming to unrealistic ideals set by advertising companies and celebrities.
My work aims to explore the subject of being a woman in contemporary society and how the pressure of being beautiful in an unrealistic world influences us every second of the day. How women deal with these pressures by following instructions on how to look good, how to dress, how to tone up your stomach and how to cut, snip, squeeze and enlarge until you fit the mould of ‘perfection’ and ‘beauty’ and are desirable to men. I want to explore this ‘private world’, the world that lives behind closed doors, where women spend their time trying to meet the desired image.
I decided to show the work as a large projection as I want to fill the space with the image, to make it unavoidable in the same way a billboard would, while also creating a dark environment where the viewer can watch without being seen. The sound is loud as to make it intense and almost awkward as hopefully the viewer tries to decide what it is they are looking at. This piece contains a lot of different references from my research and contemporary culture, and my aim is that the audience will see some of these references but also come up with other, unintended points of view for it.
