I've just been marvelling at Nina Mankin's new stop gap animation. Two short films are showing in the Comfortably Strange exhibition at View, in our video room. The story is told below, in Nina's words. Hopefully you'll be enticed to come and see her films, which compliment her amazing sculptures and fit perfectly into the exhibition theme. For those who can't attend the exhibition, I hope to be showing the films on the website in the future.
Beneath The Petticoats... Ghosts Get Horny Too
The animation is based on the supression of women's emotion and feeling in the Edwardian and Victorian times, where a woman's dignity was all she had. Lustful thoughts are to be kept hidden behind closed doors...
"Petticoats, Petticoats, Petticoats,
Ruffles and ties, ruffles and ties,
Petticoats, Petticoats, Petticoats,
Starched white blouses
Stockings and thighs"
Eliza and Gertrude are ghosts, revisiting their past. They were not beautiful and did not marry, and they died old spinsters. The wooden doll posters on the ground symbolize a part of the self, and the stiff rigidness they had to embody. They are having a dream, a fantasy, where they are free and not bound to man's ideas of what they should be. Hands come out with a feather to tickle their breasts, strange heads and eyes come up from the floorboards to reach under their skirts... The face of the wooden doll has to hide behind the other pictures, she cannot witness such thoughts of lust and nudity.
"Too much fabric m'lady, too much fabric"
The hands and heads retrieve back into the walls and floor, it takes too much time and hassle to undo all the endless buttons and layers of clothing. The ladies swing again as before as though nothing had happened, the clock ticks and the dream was all just a tease.
No comments:
Post a Comment