A slimy silvery thread reaches from the ceiling to the floor in a rear low-lit gallery. It connects a body that hovers above to a growing puddle. Besides it sits a yellow cone, warning ‘slippery when wet’. Dribbling, prosthetic fetishism, spiky bipolar emotions to cochlear implant voyeurism – Yucky is an exhibition that plays off the trigger response “Ew”, which many fail to check when engaging with difference, in particular those who live with disability.
Curated by Sam Peterson (who identifies simply as Sam, and is the artist responsible for that drool) has worked with the team at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) to deliver this exhibition. It is smart, it is probing, and it encourages viewers to check their own emotional responses.
Sam also delivered a rant (spoken word piece) that explored the word “yuck” as a visceral experience of disgusting, delivered as part of Adelaide Writers’ Week and to coincide with the exhibition. In tandem, the two are a sense of reclaiming agency by artists with lived experience of disability. Sam and the ACE team have pulled together this group of seven artists, who use a diverse materiality to communicate their personal experience.
Sitting central to the main gallery, a knitted sweater hovers with the arms extended and casting a shadow. On its front artist Makeda Duong uses song lyrics to capture that frenetic high of a manic experience; on the reverse is its low. Duong’s The Real Thing (2023) uses a song title by Faith No More, and recycled viscose nylon thread to communicate an honest and open emotional state.
It sits beautifully alongside a park bench painted a bright blue, and is a lament for the frustration of the scarcity of seating. Titled Do you want us here or not (ACE), (2023), it carries the text ‘sit if you agree’.
It is part of an ongoing series by Finnegan Shannon (US), who critiques ableist structures, and also the lack of disabled-friendly seating in the public domain. The text changes at each location where Shannon exhibits his bench. It captures succinctly the core motivation of this exhibition – ‘to consider what it is to be human outside of an able body’s set of value systems’.
Voyeurism of the other, which tips into fetishism, is played out in the photographs of Sophie Cassar, who binds her body or wears a cast or brace to make her limbs immovable, not unlike bondage. The prosthetics worn also have a sexual charge, referencing abasiophilia – the psychosexual attraction to people with mobility impairments using orthopaedic aids. There is something seductive and surreal about these images and how we relate to them. Cassar’s ongoing series Clinic of the Gaze (2023) responds to the removal of control that often comes with disability, and a level of submission that can be forced upon the people involved.
While also talking about limiting agency, and yet visually in contrast, is the complex work of Elizabeth Reed, which takes a look at institutional structures and systems of supposed support and “care”. Her focus is on cochlear implants, which usually happen at a very young age and are thought to offer independence.
Reed critiques the language that surrounds the pitch to implant, positing that it promotes deafness as a “bad thing”, and removes the sense of agency and community that comes with signing. If a cochlear implant fails, the person is rendered completely deaf and, with no Auslan signing, is further isolated. This is metaphorically played out in her video, where the movement of the lips and the captions don’t match.
Read: Exhibition review: Ten Thousand Suns, 24th Biennale of Sydney
Overall, Yucky is a well-paced exhibition tackling some of the big topics of contemporary society. It centres disabled, chronically ill, deaf and neurodivergent artists on an equal footing, and is timely in the wake of a recent NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) review, which calls for independent workers to be registered – favouring a “system approach” rather than individual needs.
Yucky pulls us back to the human experience.
Yucky
Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE)
17 February – 4 May
Lead artist: Sam Petersen
Artists: Josh Campton and Lorcan Hopper, Sophie Cassar, Makeda Duong, Elizabeth Reed and Finnegan Shannon
Public Program Curators: William Maggs and Hen Vaughan
Facilitators: Rayleen Forester, Grace Marlow and Patrice Sharkey
Free
This exhibition is part of 2024 Adelaide Festival programming. The writer travelled to Adelaide as a guest of the festival.
