Fashion/Art as Stalag Nuft Nord

Jacqueline Fraser: The Great Escape (in a Falsetto)
Michael Lett
11 July - 1 August 2009

It’s an unusual approach to exhibition titling to reference a sixties POW Escape film (artist as Steve McQueen?) while your voice is up a few octaves, but as I am often told by friends when my own voice gets a little squeaky, falsetto means you are lying. Your subconscious nervousness uncooperatively constricts your vocal chords.

Why would Fraser tell us she is lying? Let’s say she is a leg-puller. You enter the exhibition space through the layered, heavy brocaded curtains and you find yourself in a dark black box, but blinded by a searchlight from above the entrance to Lett’s office. The walls are painted black and on them are pinned up piecemeal collages. Most use figures taken from fashion and skin mags, plus family snaps, found ones, old images and new - some life size. Plus swathes of plastic, tulle, fur, and reflective shiny paper.

Yet it is all very hard to see. Not at all like the above images from Lett’s website. The gallery is dark and there is a second light near the first very dazzling one - a motorised spot that jerkily sweeps around the paper and fabric-laden walls. It zigzags rapidly so it is hard to focus on any one image. You only get glimpses. However it gives off a faint tangential peripheral light through the side of its lamp. When your eyes adjust, that moving ring helps you gradually take in some of the room’s details. Only some though. Most of the space stays murky - and within it peek out disconnected fragments, textural islands, dislocated tactile sensations - all spaced apart and isolated.

In her last show at Lett there were hints that Fraser was chafing at the hermeticism of the art world. The fashion world too. Feeling claustrophobic and glancing away from them towards the outdoors, the prosaic and the unglamorous. Yet the current installation is highly ambiguous. The Great Escape could be a gesture, one that is not about the artist at all but about the viewer. Perhaps it references the need for art to provide fantasy, a vortex to entice its audience in so they can never withdraw. This Michael Lett show could be a warning. What you think might be an escape could be a fib, a decoy - and might be a ruse, a set-up, a trap.

Changing Fraser

Jacqueline Fraser: Topless (The Hustler and Superstars)
Michael Lett
9 July - 9 August 2008

Looking at this show, the title work (at the top) is obviously a key ingredient. It seems to be telling us where this artist is heading now, for a global political sensibility is breaking into the privileged pampered hermeticism she is famous for satirising, bringing with it a sense of the filmic – a hint of the sixties French ‘new wave’.

Fraser seems to be getting sick of bored unhappy party girls and their fashion obsessed lifestyle. Her large sculptural collages are moving away from Warhol as inspiration towards (for example) Don Driver and his obsessions. More than Driver’s skin/hair fetish / collage is involved though. While introducing a dramatic use of black and white with torn paper edges, and occasional swathes of mushy grey paint, she is also letting delicate nuances of photographed outdoor colour creep in to replace the wham bam/thank you ma’m garish fabrics. One can almost taste the cool fresh air (admittedly with a whiff of Louise Lawler ‘Nam cordite mixed in). Perversely the hooded black pimps and their bronzed white bitches are ushering in a new beyond.

However there is still plenty of the old one here too, with its magazine baby doll pouts and beribboned pooches - alongside synthetic wigs, chiffon dresses and bridal veils. It all impresses. Drenched in the sarcasm of Fraser’s over-wrought catty titles.

Many people are talking of a new optimism and political awareness present in the States right now (where Fraser lives), reflecting hopes of Barrack Obama’s election. And this has been understood as being part of the Whitney Biennial too. It is part of that same buoyant mood that seems apparent in the newer content of Fraser’s work. The drug-addled, paranoid, claustrophobic subject-matter is starting to disappear.

An Exciting Physicality

Jacqueline Fraser
Michael Lett, Auckland
15 January - 9 February 2008

The recent use of deep trays in the very large collages of Jacqueline Fraser allow her to explore a very physical kind of wit, the same kind of precise humour found in say Christian Marclay’s famous combinations of record cover sleeves. Like him she uses exact scale to match contrasting materials to create an exciting new variety of hybrid image. In her case it is used in an exploration of drawing that interacts bodily with her audience. She sets her images in a large dark rectangle that can be visually explored and almost physically entered.

The size of these recent works and the fluidity of Fraser’s images is much more compelling than those seen in her earlier Venice or Walters' Prize projects. She uses clothing, drapes, wigs and decorative materials - such as braid, gold foil and diamantes - to overlay supplementary ornamental detail on to an enlarged image from Vogue of a reclining model with a dog. The resulting creases, hanging folds, ruffles and pleats trumpet fetish items with a sumptuous presence that dominates over the base image. Their drooping three dimensionality adds an unexpected humour that complicates the loaded sexual aura of the undergarments. It exacerbates as well as undermines it. It wavers with an on/off ambivalence.

Fraser’s titles are repeated as part of her imagery, to be mixed with each photographed model and her accoutrements. Her love of language though brings an emotional shrillness that interferes with and not complements the image. Maybe these titles would work better as texts alone: as single composed sentences or written poetic stacks of horizontal lines – anything but components in these trays. Their piercing tone (like fingernails on a blackboard) eats into the work’s touting of its own construction and sensual rhythms, a quality that might be valuable if separated and expanded in isolation – as written language or sound, but not as image.