Shadowboxing

By Andrew Frost

The line between the exotic and the erotic is one that has been forever transgressed – everything that is expressed as different, other, wild and primitive, are sure signs of an almost irresistible attraction that crosses any arbitrary social and cultural divide. In Sarah Contos’s exhibition Shadowboxing the artist delves into the langue of the familiar exotic in Western culture, through decoration and patterning, and via images of nudity and fertility that are ripe with the artist’s influences including “…cultural anthropology, fetishism ideologies, folk art and arts and craft methodologies from selected tribal communities.”

Contos puts her ideas front and centre in the titles of works such as Opposites are absorbed, embodied and embraced, 2014, in which the silk-screened and truncated image of the body of a woman is overlaid with jingle cones and beads, both referencing the primitivism of early 20^th century Picasso paintings, and the almost random way in which that tradition can be evoked. Contos has a pretty funny sense of humour – pieces such as the sculpture Falcon could be a bong, a handbag or a phallic symbol – or all three.

Until February 15

Gallery 9, Darlinghurst

Pic: Sarah Contos, Opposites are absorbed, embodied and embraced, 2014 screen print, acrylic and collage on linen, kanga, Fimo, Poly-fil, jingle cones, beads, thread 104×108 cm.