Badlands

Badlands-The Femme Fatale in a Time of Uncertainty
Kirsten Drewes Judy-Ann Moule Helen Redmond Elizabeth Rankin

Noir is associated with darkness and with a genre of film or literature that stylistically used darkness as a palette for its imagery. It has a dependence on the nocturnal qualities of night and all versions of noir reflect a belief in a bleak world and a lack of trust in civil society. Noir is the abject because it is associated with the end of order, with the disturbances of systems. It does not respect borders, positions or rules. In noir, identities are ambiguous, alliances are uncertain, and the ego is threatened. These are the badlands, between the real and the imagined.
In this uncertain world, new representations of noir emerge reflecting the threat to the self that this borderless world poses. Noir, in this sense, explores narratives within a dystopia, an uneasy, unsettled society. In this dystopia, sexual roles are questioned. The Femmes fatales of the past still haunt our perceptions and the cultural genre of noir that portrayed women as femme’s fatales - objects of desire who have secured their own fates. However, the world is in a state of flux. All bets are off.
Each of the 4 artists of Badlands interpret contemporary noir in their work. In painting sculpture and installation, the exhibition utilises floor, wall and ceiling spaces to create a strange new post Covid world.

The Artists
Kirsten Drewes questions traditional gender roles in this strange present. Her soft objects made of sexual but simultaneously deformed bodily forms, create ambiguous identities that unsettle the viewers. The contradictory feelings materialise the dream of a powerful self, confronted by the threat of societal circumstances.
Judy-Ann Moule examines how a contemporary visual arts practice can add diversity to the current dialogue around sexual violence. In a floor to ceiling installation, she creates an abject corridor of sheer film and human hair mounted at face level, to explore violation through dis/touch – a portmanteau of touch and disgust.
Helen Redmond describes the disruptions to society engendered by the pandemic, the emergence of authoritarian governments and war. Her paintings explore the silence of empty rooms, the suggestion of unseen menace that lurks in shadows, and our universal, child-like fear of the dark.
Elizabeth Rankin explores reversal of gender roles as a form of neo noir as she presents collages of men who discover themselves to be bedspreads and are trapped in motel rooms awaiting release in a series titled Manspread. Here they become unlikely Hommes fatales-men of mistaken identity.