“It’s That Sometimes You Move Too Loud” Exhibition opening at Edmund Pearce, Melbourne CBD

​Thursday night I made my way to Edmund Pearce gallery in the Melbourne CBD for the group exhibition “It’s That Sometimes You Move Too Loud.” It was a hot, sticky, sweaty evening, Melbourne, being in the middle of a horror heatwave, and Edmund Pearce was overflowing with people, it was a huge turnout. I wedged my way in, camera in hand and attempted to take some photos. This was my first visit to EP - it is located in the Nicholas Building off of Swanston Street - and it is a really lovely space. Two main, deceptively large galleries (although I felt sardined in on opening) and a small side space with a workable layout. Really exciting space. “It’s That Sometimes You Move Too Loud” is a Midsumma exhibition, exploring how our ‘queered bodies’ sometimes don’t match up with with our realities. The quality of work in this group exhibition (which included Christopher Sciuto, Corinna Berndt, Dirty Feminist,Drew Pettifer, Phebe Schmidt, Sophia Wallace and William McBride) was very high, conceptually mature, very thought out and technically executed perfectly. It included video work, photographs, sculpture and performance work. Each of the artists had attempted to interpret social expectations, with regards to gender, sexuality, body image and queerness, and present work that represents the ‘in-betweens’ or ‘the others.’ Life is more than blacks and whites, grotesque extremes - and in regards to sexualities, bodies and genders, the work at “It’s That Sometimes You Move Too Loud” wanted to show things are more complicated or ambiguous; most of the time a neat label or a title is irrelevant and can be detrimental or destructive. “As the title suggests, the exhibition presents us with a critical enquiry of the self. The artists depict the unknown, unspeakable or ambiguous, accessing the unease that can occur when we choose not to operate by the rules. Perhaps eventually we won’t need to look to gender, sexuality, queerness or other factors for codification”. Some beautiful photographs by Phebe Schmidt, presented a subtle take on the suffocation or loss of identity through plasticity. She renders body and object, figure and processed meat, with the same perfect, glacial aesthetic. Soft pastels; pinks and blues allow the work to be beautiful and alluring, a duality to the suffocating objects presented. Beautifully framed and technically perfect, Schmidt’s photographs were gorgeous to be enveloped by. In Androgyne, Drew Pettifer requires his subject to perform a casual gesture: tuck their penis away from view. The bodies affect a beautiful ambiguity, in which they are released from a masculine and feminine binary, drawing attention to the contours of their very different frames, faces, identities. These works were beautifully shot, with an element of tongue-in-cheek, I found quite a few patrons shying away from the pieces. I thought the works were very clever, a simple way to explore gender binaries and physical form. Queer artists have a history of exploring ‘identity’ as a main theme within their works, for obvious reasons, and I believe that in 2014 gay men share a lot of similar vulnerabilities with women - mostly the consumption and digestion of the human body within the media. Regardless of gender, the constructed or manipulated form, used as a commodity to sell or be sold within advertising and pop culture has psychological affects on those being force fed this pixilated and mutated version. Large, life-size sculptures, pixelated flat images of naked women were positioned throughout the space - works by DIRTY FEMINIST - and while not only being a beautiful, bombastic conversation about female bodies within the media and the notion of identity as a female form, they were also surreal sculptural lynch pins, using humour and the artists own body to represent the rejection of the dichotomy of “feminism and sexual fun.” This is what I loved most about “It’s That Sometimes You Move Too Loud” - it was fun. It was beautiful and fun. But it is an important exhibition, that raises more questions about extremes, about putting ourselves in boxes, putting labels on people that don’t want those labels. I, personally, am really interested in the artist’s body as a medium, as an object and as a tool, I think artists are important - to push the boundaries of the human body, to take it, philosophically and literally, to the edge of it’s stable form. We are important in pushing the human body to its limits through art and for working against the damage that is done daily by a capitalist, consumerist world; a world concerned with advertising and with selling our bodies back to us, one pixel at a time. Go see the show and have some fun. Curated by Sharon Flynn, a recent Masters graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts, with the support of Arts Victoria and the Victorian College of the Arts. An interview with Sharon about the exhibition will be coming soon.