Colour Me Dead: Sex and violence in the contemporary psyche

The Brophy exhibition is the final show in the Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artists Series run by the Potter. The series enables mid-career and senior artists to take risks and explore new directions in their practice, and is a creative initiative of the Vizard Foundation.

Phillip Brophy is internationally recognised for his new media practices using film, video, sound, and music, and is highly regarded for his multifaceted practice as film theorist, art critic, performer, curator and educator. 

His show follows those by the previous two recipients of the three Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artists series: collaborators Geoff Lowe and A Constructed World in 2012, and Jenny Watson in 2011.

In his artist statements for the show Mr Brophy contends that from romanticism through to modernism, many of art history’s icons of unbridled Eros (romantic love) can be reclassified as pathologically rapacious and symptomatic of sexually explosive schisms within the self.

Colour Me Dead is described by the artist as about ‘the rampant body-ness of contemporary times (horror genres, health fads, machine-men toys, dance music, etc) which meet the sexualised ideal of the art museum canon.

“I don’t wish to dismiss the romantic aesthetic but to consider how it forecasts the entanglement of sex, violence and the psyche in the modern era,” Mr Brophy explains.

“From Pablo Picasso’s grotesque shapes to Jackson Pollock’s splattered landscapes to Andy Warhol’s mortician’s gaze to Yves Klein’s exploitative anthropometries, modern artists have flirted with violent depictions of body, from the idealistic nude to an aggressive deconstruction of the body.” 

Senior Curator, Bala Starr, says that in researching the past 300 years of art history, Brophy has examined how the nude has been posed, lit, depicted, rendered and transformed.

“Brophy proposes that seemingly beautiful images might betray darker psycho-sexual compulsions in art-making,” Ms Starr says.

“Subjected to today’s technologies (high resolution digital photography) and modes of interpretation (models of spectatorship shaped by film theory), romanticism’s fusion of nudity, ecstasy and death loses its impact and authority.”

The exhibition comprises two videos, two animations and a number of graphic, drawn and print works.