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City Gallery
30 May - 22 Aug 2004 |
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Curatorial
Statement | Artist's
Résumé
Paul Johns has consistently produced work which is critical,
complex and subversive. Much of his work has played with the
representation of alternative sexualities, producing an important
social commentary. However, as maximalist as all this might
sound, Johns has always been a maximalist with minimalist
tendencies, for his work is without fail simple, elegant and
formal in execution. In Telecom Prospect 2004, Johns
shows four works from a wider suite of photographs entitled
'A Perfect Childhood'. In these photographs, a man and a young
boy enact a charming tableau: in one photograph the young
boy dons a mask in the shape of a white rabbit, the beguiling
bunny face sitting awkwardly atop the boy's stocky little
body. The man, wearing a grown-up version of the boy's clothing,
peers through a camera lens in one image, while in another
he too poses for the camera. There's a sweetness to these
austere images as well as a strangeness, subtle allusions
to children's author Lewis Carroll and, as arts writer Peter
Ireland puts it, 'the politics of self-identity: its formation,
adult memory of it, and the powerful role of photography in
the construction of both'.
Emma Bugden
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