Monday 5 July 2010

Catherine Gomersall @ Breathing Space, Library, Edith Cowan University

Event Title: Body Bags: "I am a Trash Bag"
Participating Artists: Catherine Gomersall

Venue:
Breathing Space, Library, Edith Cowan University
2 Bradford St, Mt Lawley

Description: This exhibition of conceptual photographic works explore the "trash bag" as a metaphor for a particular category of emotion: "bad" ones. Emotion itself has largely been treated as bad, as trash, in Western philosophical tradition - emotion has been situated as opposite and inferior to thought: affect versus cognition, passion versus reason, feeling versus thinking. The word trash has been inherited from American popular culture into popular contemporary urban Australian language to mean something other than rubbish, garbage or litter. We speak of feeling like trash. Trash and emotion share a sense of naturalness. A large part of the Western philosophical discourse regards emotion as natural: as wild forces beyond our control. Trash's etymological traces hark back to nature. For example, "trasch" in Middle English were fallen leaves and twigs. Yet, in the contemporary use of the word literal trash has come to signify the objects of consumer culture - discarded wrappers, plastic bottles, unwanted belongings. In the body bags the jumbo sized black rubbish bag embodies its badness and dread.

Start Date: 28 July 2010
End Date: 20 August 2010
Opening Times: Opening Night Wednesday 28 July 2010 @ 6pm

For more information, contact: the artist by email: info@catherinegomersall.com

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