ten found bras with ten poems
about absent breasts
exhibition, 2nd floor, APPROPRIATION DEPARTMENT CORPOREAL SECTION
Body and gender are the centre of Tender Cups, even though the body itself is never shown, being represented by bras.
Photographed in the genre of studio portrait, they are rendered flawless via photoshop retouching techniques and printed in different sizes and substrates using laser and silkscreen printing.
The disembodied appearance of these photographs is challenged by the use of visceral ready-made language appropriated from writing on breasts, sourced from medical and theoretical discourses, autobiography, testimony, art history, internet research, lingerie advertising, women's writing, feminist and queer gender theories, and social media.
TITLE WORK: Tender Cups
TITLE EXHIBITION: Ten found bras
with ten poems about absent breasts
AUTHOR: paula roush
GALLERY: msdm House-Studio-Gallery
DATE: 2021
MEDIUM: installation
and photobookwork
INSTALLATION
Wall installation:
photographic silkscreen prints
on Fabriano paper,
mono and duotones
24 prints,
with 5 film acetates
242 cm x 340 cm
Shelf installation:
5 busts with artist’s book
and boxes
22cm x 458 cm x 2 cm
Table installation:
20 folios 24cm x 16.75 cm
(folded)
See the 3-d model of the
installation here
PHOTOBOOKWORK
PAGES: 54
DIMENSIONS: 24cm x 16.75 cm
PAPER: 157gsm matt paper
BINDING: Unbound
COVER: Silkscreen printed wrap cover
on 200 gsm fabriano paper
PROCESS: Laser print and silkscreen
COLOUR: Colour monotone process
EDITION: 1
PUBLISHER: msdm publications
YEAR: 2016
[See the photobookwork here]
ABOUT THE WORK
Body and gender are the centre of Tender Cups, even though the body itself is never shown, being instead represented by bras. Photographed in the genre lof studio portrait, the bras are rendered flawless via photoshop retouching techniques and printed in different sizes and substrates using laser and silkscreen printing.
The disembodied appearance of these photographs is challenged by the use of visceral ready-made language appropriated from writing on breasts, sourced from medical and theoretical discourses, autobiography, testimony, art history, internet research, lingerie advertising, women's writing, feminist and queer gender theories, and social media.
Tender Cups is structured around "the breast" in content and medium, amplified with contemporary anxieties around gender and auto-fiction.
As a visual object that adopts the form of the book, it doesn’t fit into neat book categories (as a photobook or a literary book) the same way ‘breasts’ destabilise binary definitions of gender/sexuality, and (un)fit/(un)healthy bodies.
Format and binding invoke the chest in a non-binary way, symmetric and assymetric, flat and three-dimensional. Whilst the photographs of bras are presented as mono and duotone prints, the textual elements are visually composed as breasts-sentences with an anatomical reference that
supplements breasts' absence from the pages
In terms of genealogy of a practice, the book relates to
Gertrude Stein's experimental use of everyday objects and language
(the title is a hommage to Tender Buttons) and Martha Hall’s
artists books ( breast and medicine, as in The Rest of My Life II).
