Monday, April 26, 2010

T I F F A N Y P A R B S


Tiffany Parbs’ cosmetic explores just such a gap utilising the medium of jewellery. This new body of work problematises the surgical processes that would purport to erase dermatological traces of time and history. Parbs uses her own body to stretch the boundaries of what we know and understand as ‘jewellery’ as well as ‘skin’.

This understanding of the skin as a complex enfolding of time and space is further reiterated in “bake”, where the word “RAW” has been burnt into the delicate region of the décolletage.(2) “bake” appropriates the body as if it were a flat surface, using the skin as a photographic membrane and deliberately exposing it to the stain of the sun.

Here adornment figures as a crafting of the self; ‘jewellery’ fashioned from the biological matter of the very skin which is its ground. Again it is the secondary mediation of the photograph (itself a type of ‘skin’ (3)), which so effectively re-marks the seamlessness of cosmetic processes. With “bake” we are forced to reconsider the permanency of surgery, the cultural impulse to nullify the complexity of time.

Rendered photographically, the work developed as part of cosmetic imbricates the conventions of jewellery with photography, marrying the material with the conceptual, the cultural with the political. Crucially, Parbs has developed a unique dialogue between craft methodologies, apt to amplify our relationship to the skin of our own bodies.


2 comments:

  1. Miss Muffin I really liked that japanese face video, what beautiful little noises it made too :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cindy Sherman could be another artist of interest :)

    ReplyDelete