Press Releases
FeatDiane Archer's lens based work makes wry comment on the importance of ‘fitting in’ and our frequent inability to do so. She looks at the lengths we go to change our appearance and assume alternative roles, often deceiving ourselves into believing that we are somehow more attractive. Archer will show Feat, a sequence of short film observations that trail 'Subjects', or women (including herself) walking in high heels. Displayed on a small CCTV monitor the surveillance like footage of unsuspecting specimens appears comical, until on prolonged viewing the real act of trying to ‘pull it off’ in such idealised footwear as both natural and comfortable begins to expose physical dysfunction, inelegance and humiliating effects.
Julia Devonshire
Curator, No'flk Up Sticks
November 2008
Nana's House
These images represent both the fulfilment of expected behaviour and the unexpected contradictions of our relationships with each other. My father blows out the candles in an exaggerated fashion, playing the part. We cram around a large table in a small room, 6ft tall adults on little chairs with their elbows in.Everywhere I look there are photos on her walls, a living history of time passing. There is no sense of the present in Nana's House, only a continuation of the birthdays, the Christmases, the graduations... events creating a storehouse of memory. Nana's memories, preserved and polished, carefully created to specification.
Diane Archer
March 2008
Fitting Room
For the Fitting Room series of photographs, I decided to explore a space that holds a morbid fascination for me. The fitting room has the power to make my dreams come true, as I try on clothes that will somehow transform me into a beautiful person. In reality, I am always disappointed by the body that presents itself under fluorescent lighting, reflected toward me from all angles. In the beginning I was afraid of the photographs; I hid in corners, with my head down. Over time I began to look at my body as a visual subject, with lighting, angles, symmetry, etc. I began to show my face, and even look directly at the camera. In looking at the images later, I began to realize that although the images show an unconventionally beautiful body, they are beautiful in an unexpected way. I hope that these photographs create a feeling of the possibility for beauty to be in anyone. This is perhaps the simplest, most essential question in this work: What is beautiful?
Diane Archer
September 2007
Ancient Women
"Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots."
- T.S. Eliot
Ancient Women portrays an encounter between a mannequin and a model, a meeting whose black-and-white documentation examines our aesthetic perceptions of women. By turns confrontational, abstract, sexual and disturbing, Ancient Women questions the origin of a woman's body-image, and the means by which society influences a woman's view of herself.
The mannequin has come to represent society's collective determination of physical beauty: Man has created a woman, and he has made her in the image of perfection. Ancient Women studies the two types, the figurine and the flesh-and-blood. Rationally, and from experience, most women know that mannequins are unrealistic in their forms; but instinctively, viscerally, women accept the "beauty" of mannequins, and their omnipresence helps to set a standard of physical perfection. Ancient Women is about that disconnect: the gap between beauty and perfection, and the origins of our notions of each.
Shot in a black, stark place, darkness and light work to reveal dismantled (and reassembled) bodies and recontextualized body-parts, and to recast the sexualized imagery which is common in our society. Dealing in our own expectations and convictions, Ancient Women seeks to reshape the common visual language that pervades shop windows and billboards, questioning its value and source.
Ordinarily when we look at a mannequin, we see the expected; we see an item for sale. We do not question the vehicle, but it has seeped into our consciousness, and it has changed the way that women are viewed by themselves and others. What I and many other women also know is that we have taken this distorted and uncompromising view and turned it onto ourselves.
Diane Archer
January 2006