Preaching to the Perverted presents a new series of sculptures and digitally mediated performances by Anastasia Booth. Employing the material sensuality of Baroque sculpture and the humour of goddess ritual performance, the exhibition poetically investigates Freudian fetishism. Taking its cue from the anthropological objects in Freud’s studio, Preaching to the Perverted considers the gendered rhetoric of psychoanalytic theory via an inflation of its mythological and mystic undercurrents. By drawing attention to and re-enacting key female characters – goddesses, saints, constellations – Booth plays with the representation and omission of female sexuality and agency in Freudian discourse. These evocations speak to Booth’s fascination with depictions of female desire, sexuality and authority in a contemporary context.
Booth works across sculpture, moving image, photography, sound and performance. Her practice playfully interrogates the portrayal of women’s desire in cultural production and symbolic discourse, with a particular focus on fetishism. Employing strategies of subversion, abstraction and appropriation, her works draw influence from contemporary subcultures, art history and mythology. By reconstructing these visual codes through the formal and theoretical languages of artistic practice, her works speak to the problematic, humorous and often paradoxical relationship between depictions of the feminine and women’s desire and agency.
OPENING: 15 September 2016, 7PM
