The Moat Bar Awards for excellence in Video and Drawing.
DRESS YOU UP IN YOUR LOVE explores the body, identity, and sexuality through a queer feminist lens. Viewers will enter a boudoir-like space to experience an immersive installation comprising video, sculpture, found objects, and sound. The effect is to provide a safe space for viewers to confront and challenge preconceived notions around their own sexuality, gender and relationship to the body.
The works will explore the constructed-ness and performativity of gender by subverting and appropriating tropes within Western society around the masculine and feminine in a tongue-in-cheek way. Gender is acknowledged as performative in the sense that it can be learnt and can act as a tool to control and categorise our bodies. However, when seen through a queer lens, gender can be playful and fluid as well as affirm our identity and belonging in the world. The framing of the work acknowledges that our biological bodies do not have to inform our gender or sexuality but can be tools to help us understand what feels affirming. The artist also brings their own lived experience to the work with the intention of using that vulnerability to open up conversation in a way that feels intimate and safe.
Angelina Innocent is an emerging artist making, playing and living on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. She deals with the complexities of identity, sexuality and queerness, by critically reflecting on patriarchy and heteronormativity while also sharing lived experience around these issues. Within Innocent’s multidisciplinary practice, she works predominantly with sculpture and installation with an overarching collage influence. More recently she has turned towards video, photography and sound to further communicate themes within her work. Innocent also looks at popular culture over the decades and the archive, to further critique societies binaries. There is a strong sense of humour in Innocent’s work, which allows for the more serious and political themes to be processed safely and comfortably.
You can see more of Angelina Innocent’s work and contact her at @angelinainnocent.art
Angelina respectfully acknowledges the people of the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and their Elders past and present, who are the Traditional Owners of the land on which she makes work and draws inspiration from. Sovereignty was never ceded.
