honorable mention
Phebe Schmidt australia
title
Sweethearts
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entry description
Sweethearts plays with identity construction, with exaggerated fictional representations of women who are navigating the private/public divide in an era of individualism. Drawing on characters in soft-core porn like “Sweethearts” (1986), who appear in “tasteful and sexy scenes,” that “couples will enjoy,” and the Mills & Boon heroine who ensures the reader is “able to relate to her, laugh with her, cry with her - as it’s through her that we fall in love with the hero,” the characters in Sweethearts perform for an anonymous multiplicitous audience rather than one (male) hero character. In these performances, Schmidt explores common conceptions of beauty, gender, ageing, as well as self-love/self-care, in order to reveal transgressive, aspirational and alternative portrayals of subjectivities, abstracted by contemporaneity, yet strangely nostalgic. Travel the world with Sweethearts without leaving your armchair.about the photographer
Phebe Schmidt is a Melbourne-based photographer who creates hyperreal images, often portraits, which are tightly constructed but essentially ambiguous. Her work has a stylised plasticity and bright surface that acts as a mask that plays with ideas of self, theatrical role-playing, and what lies beneath. ‘Plasticity’ is a key term Schmidt uses to describe her work and marks a contemporary obsession with homogenised, generic beauty ideals that conform to gender, social, and cultural norms. As part of this approach, Schmidt treats her subjects like a product, as if positioned and conceptualised for an advertisement to highlight how the body is treated as a commodity.back to gallery