25 august - 15 september 2007
Opening: Saturday 15 September 2007, 6 pm

> KARAOKE CONFESSIONS by Antoinette Murdoch

 

                    

You don’t have to like me:  the collective title for approximately 20 “speech-bubbles” form part of Antoinette Murdoch’s installation and performance exhibition entitled Karaoke Confessions. These text works are simple quotations picked up from individuals (who were at one point or another close to the artist) or just declarations by the artist. Echoing the artists personal handwriting in different shades of felt fabrics, they rhythmically repeat the same lines like the chorus of a song - repeated so many times that they become real to the karaoke singer and her audience. These, often drunken, confessions are reminiscent of flashing roadhouse signs and become a dialogue of kitsch thoughts. These simple confessions specific to time and place are taken out of context, appropriated and manipulated into visually appealing pop shapes and placed in a gallery space, in this context seen as works of art the personal and subjective nature of the confessions calls into question the significance and specificity of their content. 

“I intend to scream, shout, race the engine, throw tantrums in Bloomingdales if I feel like it, and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers, I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself, that is, quite simply the bitch philosophy, and it seems particularly refreshing in the face of all the contortions women are taught to put themselves through” (Wurtzel, E. (1999). Bitch. London: Quartet Books).