Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Währinger Straße 59, 2nd Staircase, 1st Floor, 1090 Wien
19 January - 3 March 2012. Opening on 18 January, 19h.
Works in the Exhibition
Michele O'Marah (USA)
Michele O’Marah lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an artist and filmmaker who remakes familiar scenes from popular movies and television, using a handcrafted technique that allows her to recreate the narrative as her own. “For more than a decade, O’Marah has been working in the geographic and economic shadows of Hollywood and has lavished attention on many of its forgotten or soon-to-be-forgotten products and by-products.” (Michael Ned Holte, Artforum) Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
A Girl's Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do (2009)
Three-channel video installation, consisting of The Death of Barb Kopetski, WORD UP!, and Don't Call Me Babe
The trilogy is part of Michele O'Marah's long-term examination of the mass-media's representation of the revolutionary. The artist has cast three non-professional actresses to perform the character of Barb as an icon of femininity and MTV version of a revolutionary heroine, restaging scenes from the film Barb Wire (1996). She takes Pamela Anderson as an "empty center", imposing on the Hollywood machine her small economic non-budget and hand-made sets and props, shot mainly in the artist's studio, tactically reconstructing Hollywood productions. The artist subversively misuses the most sexually explicit scenes from the film, those with increased shock value, and produces a mimetic gesture not directly of the embodiment of Pamela Anderson, but of the very cultural and social codes. Anderson is a kind of ready-made object in the consciousness of mass-media society, playing herself in looped karaoke fashion between a scripted performance and celebration of herself. Her displaced presence, as an empty metaphor, allows O'Marah's actresses, without entering into confrontation with Anderson's performance, to substitute themselves to her and project other desires into the character as each turns into a cinematic persona of her own, each copy being approximate.
A Girl's Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do (2009)
Three-channel video installation, consisting of The Death of Barb Kopetski, WORD UP!, and Don't Call Me Babe
Courtesy the artist and Brennan & Griffin Gallery