A man that didn’t have betrayal in his heart harkens back to a younger me, poetically reconstructing engagements in erotic scenario by delving into past memories. Capricious and foolish longing, desire gone awry and where the toil of sensuality (its unpronounced labour) is a submission to melancholy. Instead of using erotic abstraction and post-structuralism to reclaim intimacy, these sculptures revel in floundering inadequacy. An ontology both anxious and self-aware which draws from love hotel interiors, industrial materials, kink environments, classical statuary, ball gags, fetishism and diaristic modes. Fragments amass into scapes of mock dramaturgy, where luxury and sensuality are fraught with cheapness, unable to sustain the projections of arousal we attribute to them.
Anastasia Booth teases arts erotic potential as fragmented or flawed substitute. By interleaving the languages of Freudian fetishism, kink, dark fantasy, feminism, history and personal anecdote, she ponders, can the artist as an agentive and deviant subject fight off gendered limitations and her own sexual failures. The dialogues she dabbles in can be problematic and contradictory, where no real answer is forthcoming. Leather, glass, lustrous metals, sex toys, latex, timber, hair and lube inspire minimalist forms that build perplexing relationships to the body. Situated in a liminal zone these works engage with the imitative fragment and confuse it with the veritable subject. A trace of material recalling the erotic despite any prior purpose, the benign surface enacting pleasure and moral consequence.
Anastasia works in Brisbane, Australia. She refined her craft at the Queensland University of Technology, completing her Practice-led Honours and Doctoral study. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including projects at The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Institute of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Queensland Museum, Griffith University Art Museum, Milani Gallery CARPARK, The Australian Experimental Art Foundation and was artist in residence
at Outer Space.
