| |
 |
Gemma Jones
Girls, Dresses & Dreams: Paintings & Dresses by Gemma Jones
March 4 - March 21 / 2004
|
Gemma Jones is a Melbourne-based contemporary painter whose work involves a playful pop approach to celebrating and re-representing the image of the anonymous female face of commercial culture.
Her forthcoming exhibition at Helen Gory Galerie as part of the Melbourne Fashion Festival program will juxtapose paintings on large traditional canvases with hand-painted dresses.
The dresses in Gemma’s show will pay tribute to the aesthetic of the fad of the poster and paper dresses of the 60s, where the body is used like a moving canvas, and where fabric is treated less as vehicle for pattern as image.
These dresses were typically short, sleeveless a-line shifts, without complicated seams or darts and as such were perfect ‘screens’ for large neck-to-knee photographic and representational images – most famous 'Eye' Poster Dress designed by Harry Gordon, 1968. In pop art style the female body became akin to a walking advertisement, and yet advertising nothing overt nor specific … other than fashion and fashionability itself.
While the artist takes her point of reference from the poster dresses of the sixties, her works will not be mass produced, nor disposable; they are all one-off, hand-made, hand painted creations. Like the contemporary tee-shirt, this project uses the body as a vehicle for artistic parade, experience and identification, and aims to draw attention to the close association between art, the self and the body.
The dresses will be simple mini A-line shifts based on the original shape of the poster dress. They will carry large, pop painted images, and aim to evoke a nostalgic feeling for the ‘youth explosion’ of the experimental sixties, while imbuing it with the warmth of a hand-made tribute. Both an artwork and a fashion item, the dresses are designed to both be comfortably worn, and hung on display as an artwork.
The dresses will compliment the paintings in the exhibition thematically and stylistically.
The imagery will largely be close-ups of anonymous women’s faces culled from fleeting moments of commercial vintage pop culture.
Much inspiration is taken from representations from dress pattern packaging, and this hook with fashion and its overlap with imagining, crafting, the individual and commercial mass culture is a significant undercurrent for the artist.
Gemma is also a collector, a curator and an occasional DJ. In 2000 she completed her Masters degree at University of Melbourne with a thesis on ideas of nostalgia in contemporary Australian art. She exhibits in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Goldcoast, and is collected Australia-wide. She has recently been involved with a project with Habitat in London promoting young artists to the world, and will exhibit for the first time in California in February 2004.
See online folio of previous works at www.gemmajones.net
Dress construction is a collaboration with Smashing Time |
Further Information:
Helen Gory
03 95252808 0413123705
[email protected]
www.helengory.com
wed - sat 11am/6pm |
|
|