Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Bachelor of Communications Honours

School

School of Communications and Contemporary Art

Faculty

Faculty of Education and Arts

First Supervisor

Dr Panizza Allmark

Abstract

This self-reflexive photomedia project interrogates the 'flower girl' role as a cultural fetishism of 'innocent' white-girl femininity, which I claim is perpetuated in the bridal fantasy. In my photomedia work the theme of 'death' and the uncanny is explored as well as the themes of 'wildness' and 'violence' in order to subvert the dominant discourse of ideal white femininity which is defined in popular culture by a sanitised bourgeois aesthetic. I attack the bourgeois surface of the bridal magazine in my artwork as I perform the 'flower girl' role in the context of popular culture and capitalism. The flower girl role, historically a fertility symbol, regenerated into the age of consumption is symbolic of a fertile capitalist economy. Inspired by the work of the feminist artist Barbara Kruger, in Death Lilly the bridal magazine is deconstructed and reappropriated. I do this to expose the flower girl as an agent for white, middle-class, Western ideals of femininity which I argue provide a counter to the liberations of feminism and are oppressive to young girls. I seek to give rise to a more multidimensional narrative than what is presented in the homogenous bridal culture. Furthermore, in uncovering repressed personal memory, my photomedia work attempts to illustrate a way in which meaning can be inscribed into a symbolic object outside of consumptive process.

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