SURVEILLING THE BREACH
DAVIDE MENEGHELLO | JODIE WINGHAM
1 AUGUST — 31 AUGUST, 2019
Davide Meneghello and Jodie Wingham both have artistic practices rooted in their authorship over imagery. They make use of physical interventions and editorial dissections to guide us, first and foremost, in cross-examining how we perceive the many strains of content held in an image, by leading us to re-examining its given narrative, its prescribed form and its conceptual framework.
Meneghello investigates ideas concerned with gender representation, queer history and the construction of the homosexual discourse, and derives much of his imagery from archives that are still loaded with preceding narratives which he adapts and diverts into new ones. In ‘Wrestler’ (1943/2019), for example, Meneghello draws our attention to the intimate bond of the wrestlers by presenting various croppings of the original image alongside one another in the size we would see them in the original image. As we see them here, the non-linear reading of time becomes clear, as does the authority afforded by his authorship to anachronistically make a dormant image relevant via artistic license.
On the other hand, Wingham’s imagery is suggestive of personal narratives. Fiction and non-fiction are blurred but we do not when or where. Figures are often cropped so that our gaze is focused only on specific body parts or on articles of clothing, as in ‘Unbuttoned Shirt’ (2018), which elicits the sense that we are complicit in spying on the protagonist’s now-shared moment of privacy. Yet, if the image source is fictitious, what are we actually complicit in? If it isn’t, what does it say about us? This is further complicated by images being applied to non-traditional methods of display by way of sculptural form, where the pictorial surfaces are crumpled, folded and obstructed, stalling us in the present, as we are both teased and amputated of the existence of time and narrative beyond by the physical limitations of what we are seeing.