Emily G Stremming

I N R E V I E W

EMILY G STREMMING

Emily Stremming’s one-night-only exhibition at the Juice on Cherokee wove together sex and death as a pleasurable visual warp and disturbing narrative weft embodying film critic Laura Mulvey’s thesis that “Woman’s desire is subject to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound.”

In a large creamy colored photo weave Coming, Darling, a gorgeously illustrated brunette coyly applies her lipstick attending to her vanity, glamorized and sexualized under the mid-20th century trade mark SOIR DE PARIS. Below her figure the cosmetics company logo BOURJOIS anchors the vertical composition. Her eroticism is subject to the golden haired male figure entering behind her, as she surveys herself and he observes her.

The vintage glamour of the scene is interrupted by the film noir-like montage of an exploded schematic diagram of a semi-automatic handgun. Perhaps she is thinking of the gun. Maybe he is. We can’t know for sure or even why. Either way it is a threat of death and displeasure that’s at odds with the delightful promise of a night in the city of lights.

Ultimately the meaning of this superimposed image is sexual difference, via the fetishization of the gun and the dimorphism of male and

female which reveals the slick visual surface of the man and woman as a commodity fetish. An alternative read of the scene lies in ascertaining guilt for the thought of the gun. Who is asserting control here? Did she cheat? Did he? Revenge? Who is coming or ultimately about to go away? Who’ll be punished, or forgiven? This more sadistic side fits in with establishing narratives and demands a story.

Indeed, a story was supplied on the opposite wall with You Made Me Do It, a coagulation of photo transfers, spattered in blood linked together by a cotton thread wound around the nails pinning the transfers to the wall itself. The overall effect is that of a psychopathic assassin plotting a crime or alternatively a detective attempting to solve one by connecting the dots.

Biological diagrams of male and female genitalia, gun schematics, a bare female body (that of the artist) supine on a filthy floor and grime-stained architectural interiors suggest a reconstructed crime scene. But here it is a symbolic order in which a woman or man live out fantasies, traumas and obsessions through an Instagram account or random Google image search. By imposing on them the silent authorship and vulnerable body of the artist, Stremming as maker isn’t just the bearer of meaning.

Generally, the presence of a female form is the indispensable element in the pleasurable spectacle of a film, TV show or magazine image. Yet that very same visual element tends to work against the continuation of a narrative, freezing attention in moments of erotic contemplation of flesh. Stremming’s obsessive slicing and dicing of existing source materials, intended in part, to see how images work often engenders these divergent characteristics outlined by Mulvey’s visual theory. When the male figure arrives, as seen in Coming, Darling, the narrative speculation begins anew, even without the ambiguity of the montaged gun.

Analyzing pleasure tends to destroy the thing itself, like explaining a joke ruins a good laugh, but in Venus, another of Stremming’s trademark photo weaves, the male narrative and female spectacle split is magically suspended. Here, two genitalia-less mannequins, still identifiably male and female, are locked in an armless embrace as futile lovers. What could they possibly get out of this frustrating relationship? But as Stremming slices and dices the two source photographs together into one flesh, merging the eroticization of the spectacle and drama of a story, she fuses the forms in platonic love instead of dissecting them with psychoanalytical autopsy.

-Daniel McGrath

Emily G Stremming, installation view (image courtesy of the artist)

www.the-juice-stl.com

ALLTHEARTSTL.COM WINTER 2018/19 IN REVIEW