B.

Youths in wedding lace and veils, suited women and humans with feathered wings and heads of rabbits are amongst the dream-like players and guests at Christine Webster's Black Carnival.

Inspired by ancient Roman wall paintings such as the Villa of the Mysteries, Webster began to formulate ideas of her own frieze of human abandonment and decadence during her year in Dunedin in 1991 as the Francis Hodgkins Fellow. Whereas the Romans achieved their efforts with plaster and paint, Webster has created a portable frieze of life-size cibachromes that totally envelops the space it is installed into.

Drawing upon a cast of local identities in Dunedin, Webster encouraged her models to undress, dress and cross-dress, to don masks, discard their inhibitions and act out fantastical roles. The lyrical, ecstatic, shy and tormented characters that resulted reveal pagan, classical, renaissance and iconic sources yet have the atmosphere of a circus or Mardi Gras.

Through stance and states of dress and undress the participants challenge conventional definitions of those roles. In the middle of this bizarre ballroom stands the viewer - a voyeur from which figures shrink or which they choose to confront, ignore or welcome to participate.

('Christine Webster: Black Carnival', Bulletin, No.95, April/May 1995, p.3)

This exhibition was held at the McDougall Art Annex in the Arts Centre.