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Provocations: The work of Christine Webster
Exhibition
Complex, theatrical and fearless, the unsettling photography of renowned UK-based New Zealand artist Christine Webster will go on display next month.
Installation view: Provocations: The work of Christine Webster, March 2010
Webster's work has long entranced and challenged audiences. Provocations: The work of Christine Webster is a spectacular survey, curated by Dr Anne Kirker, inviting viewers to reassess their expectations of human behaviour while considering questions of propriety and expression.
Featuring many of Webster's best-known series – such as Black Carnival and Circus of Angels – alongside a new film project developed especially for the exhibition, Provocations highlights many of Webster's key artistic concerns, including sexuality, identity and representations of the body.
Director Jenny Harper says Provocations reflects Webster's fascination with the human condition and the various layers of our identities.
'Her work sometimes pushes our personal limits and challenges the established conventions of portraiture of women by questioning the privileged "male gaze". The artist herself features in a number of works – to be not only voyeur but participant – and she encourages her models to play a role for the camera, to feel at ease with being watched.'
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated 96-page catalogue.
Born in Pukekohe, Christine Webster is an artist who deliberately creates work in different countries and social situations. She has been awarded numerous grants, including from the Goethe Institute and the Arts Council of England. After graduating from Massey University with a diploma in photography, Webster began investigating the balance of power between genders.
She launched her New Myths series in the late 1980s, featuring male and female nudes set against dramatic black backgrounds, before going on to stage a landmark touring exhibition in 1994 with her Black Carnival works. More recent work includes the highly provocative Le Dossier, her films Blindfield and Vigil, as well as Rapport, an exciting new film created especially for the exhibition.
Today, Christine Webster lives in the United Kingdom and teaches photomedia at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
Related
Exhibition
Provocations: The work of Christine Webster
7 June 2010
Complex, theatrical and fearless, Christine Webster's photography has long entranced and challenged audiences. This spectacular survey presents Webster's best-known works alongside an exciting new film project.
Collection
Christine Webster Iron Tulips 3
Christine Webster uses photography to explore ideas about gender, sexuality, representation and identity. Her carefully staged works subvert expectations about power and control. Here, a woman stands on a balcony with a bouquet of flowers. On paper, it’s a conventional romantic image that affirms traditional associations between femininity and beauty. These metal ‘tulips’, however, resemble a quiver of arrows, and the figure is deliberately androgynous, playing with our certainty about what we see. It’s a reminder that the female body – often linked, like flowers, with beauty and pleasure – is also a source of strength, and sometimes danger.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Christine Webster Iron Tulips 2
Christine Webster uses photography to explore ideas about gender, sexuality, representation and identity. Her carefully staged works subvert expectations about power and control. Here, a woman stands on a balcony with a bouquet of flowers. On paper, it’s a conventional romantic image that affirms traditional associations between femininity and beauty. These metal ‘tulips’, however, resemble a quiver of arrows, and the figure is deliberately androgynous, playing with our certainty about what we see. It’s a reminder that the female body – often linked, like flowers, with beauty and pleasure – is also a source of strength, and sometimes danger.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Christine Webster Iron Tulips 1
Christine Webster uses photography to explore ideas about gender, sexuality, representation and identity. Her carefully staged works subvert expectations about power and control. Here, a woman stands on a balcony with a bouquet of flowers. On paper, it’s a conventional romantic image that affirms traditional associations between femininity and beauty. These metal ‘tulips’, however, resemble a quiver of arrows, and the figure is deliberately androgynous, playing with our certainty about what we see. It’s a reminder that the female body – often linked, like flowers, with beauty and pleasure – is also a source of strength, and sometimes danger.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Christine Webster Mika: Kai Tahu
Mika is well known as an outrageous cross-gender cabaret performer in New Zealand. He pays great attention to the detail and presentation of each performance as well as his theatrical costuming. Christine Webster approaches her subject with respect but also with the intention of subverting traditional ideas of identity, gender and culture. Much of Webster’s often-controversial work is life size and focuses on the human body and psyche. Webster’s sophisticated technical manipulation of the photographic image has resulted in a highly resonant surface. This work is one from a series titled 'Black Carnival'.
Webster was born in Pukehohe, north of Auckland. She studied at Massey University, Victoria University and Wellington Polytechnic. Webster has been awarded a number of Creative New Zealand and Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grants and was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in 1991. She undertook a Goethe Institute Cultural Scholarship to Berlin in 1994. Webster currently lives in Scotland.
Collection
Christine Webster Red Yolk
Using large-scale photography to explore the strangeness and complexity of the human pysche, this artist creates confrontational and often controversial images. Based on a photograph of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China, the dust mask here symbolises the battle between individual freedom and authoritarianism, and specifically the gagging of students involved in pro-democracy protests. Given Webster’s ongoing interest in the treatment of women, the mask may also allude to the silencing of their political and personal voices in many societies.
The text ‘Red Yolk’, printed like a plaque beneath the main image, extends the interpretation of the entire work offering a range of meanings to the viewer. This work is one from a series titled ‘Tiannamen Square’.
Collection
Christine Webster Blood
Christine Webster is one of New Zealand’s most innovative artist photographers working with a traditional image – the male nude. This work is from her series, ‘Possession and Mirth’ (1992) in which she explored gender, identification and appropriation through myth and symbol. Blood, with its doubled image of a male figure enveloped in what appears to be a mantle of blood, has a sexual and erotic intent. Webster’s deconstruction of the photographic subject is a post-modern technique that aims to highlight notions of the gaze, objectification and shifting perspectives of identity. Webster studied at Massey University and Victoria University between 1976 and 1978 and in 1979 she received a Diploma in Photography from Wellington Polytechnic. In 1990 she was awarded the Polaroid Small Projects Grant, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Webster was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1991, and undertook a Goethe-Institut Cultural Scholarship to Berlin in 1994. She has exhibited widely in New Zealand as well as in Australia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Germany.