Gerwyn Davies' photographs explore the expression of camp as an aesthetic strategy in photographic self-representation. They renew and affirm camp's queer critical capacities, moving beyond popular understandings of camp as a gay sensibility, a mode of theatrical performativity, or an ironic inversion of taste.
'Plush' brings together works from the series 'Utopia', 'Deluxe', 'Sunny Boys', 'Idols', 'Leisure Sick' and 'Bel-Air' all produced over the last four years. In each series, the artist's body is adorned, concealed and transformed by extravagant costuming constructed from readymade and mass-produced materials. They take on characteristics that reflect the architecture and atmosphere of the locations they appear within – digital habitats created from altered and enhanced 'real world' spaces.
For Davies, camp is a performative and aesthetic intensification that can be applied to images and the image-making process itself. Through character development, costume assemblage, performance and postproduction, his work makes evident the fabrications involved in the act of photography. They celebrate the incongruities that enable the body to resist identification and renegotiate the fixed conditions of normative visibility – or be hidden in plain sight.
Gerwyn Davies, ‘Opera’ 2017. Archival inkjet print. Image courtesy: the artist; Jan Murphy Gallery Protege, Brisbane; and Michael Reid Gallery, Berlin
For further details on this exhibition, visit the UNSW Galleries website
