Kathy Temin - Iconic Moments

For immediate release

Kathy Temin - Iconic Moments

17 March ­ 3 April 2004 Sue Crockford Gallery 2 Queen St Auckland

Australian artist Kathy Temin's work has over a 14 year period engaged with ideas about identity, memory, and displacement through references to suburban and cultural icons in popular culture. She is particularly interested in situations where private and collective memory coincide. Temin work uses a broad range of media taking the form of objects, pictures, wall drawings, installations and photographs. Her early work used materials and references to childhood and adolescence in the form of synthetic fur sculptural objects and with felt pictures relating to the game "fuzzy felt". She has made works portraying private activities and displayed them in public spaces. For example, during her residency at PS1 in New York she made a series of photographs titled ŒAuditions for a pair of koalas¹ where she asked American actors to impersonate a pair of koalas mating. Most people that came to the audition had not seen a koala in the flesh and brought their own projection and fantasy of how a koala behaves to the project. These photographs will be included in Public/Private, The 2nd Auckland Triennial 2004, Auckland Art Gallery 20 Mar - 30 May 2004

Adolescence, and the idealization of it, is a recurring theme. This concept features in the project My Kylie Collection, installed last year as part of the exhibition Extended Play at the Govett-Brewster Art gallery, New Plymouth, where Temin made an installation titled My Kylie Collection centered around a teenage girl¹s bedroom containing real collected material. The installation was a combination of works made around the fantasy of being a fan that included felt pictures, mirrored perspex objects, and a series of glass pictures titled Frozen Moments (as part of My Kylie Collection). These works engage with the subject of fandom, where Kylie Minogue has been used as the subject to engage with ideas of celebrity, fandom and identity. Most recently Temin presented a one night event at the Institute of Contemporary art (ICA) in London where 20 performers were auditioned live singing either an impersonation or an interpretation of any Kylie Minogue song to four judges from the art world and an audience. She is currently working on a dvd documenting the event.

For the Sue Crockford Gallery exhibition Iconic Moments, Temin has continued to combine images of women from the media, images which are usually throw away and transitory. These works are fused glass pictures that reference both classical relief and commemorative ideals. The fetishized material of fused glass has a seductive and glossy surface that was originally used by Temin to reference the ideals associated with fandom. She used the bubblegum colours of pink, cream and brown where imitation of chocolate and ice cream allude to addiction, fantasy, narscissim, projection, and consumption. With the new series, Iconic Moments, the images of women are translated into a palette of black, grey, and white glass. The images are art historical such as Jemima Stehli's image of herself as an Allan Jones chair sculpture, as well as images taken from the mass media. Temin combines interpretations of images of well known icons like Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue, and the Queen, and pinup girls from the past. Also included in the exhibition are Temin¹s reinterpretation of Robert Mapplethorpe¹s celebrated portrait of Louise Bourgeois and a portrait image of Eva Hesse.

Kathy Temin acknowledges her identification with other artists and their work and aims to create different readings of these images.

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