Curatorial Statement | Artist's Résumé


'Parton consciously employs ambiguity juxtaposing pathos and sexiness, paying homage to popular culture with more than just a small nod to teen culture. The work aims to highlight the discomfort created by the self conscious need to perform, the acting out of roles that is part of forming identity.'

So writes curator Charlotte Huddleston about Sarah Jane Parton's ongoing series of videos, starring a stellar cast of the artist and her friends. Floating above City Gallery Wellington's foyer, Sarah Jane Parton's DVD projection She's So Usual is a strangely touching music video. Dressed in a 1980s-era ball gown, the artist sings along karaoke-style to the Cyndi Lauper song 'Time After Time' from Lauper's 1983 album She's So Unusual. Parton performs with the self-conscious posturing of a teenager in front of the bedroom mirror, staging an act that hovers between timid uncertainty and precocious guile. In preparing for this work, Parton says she felt as though she was 'getting ready for a school ball'. She wears a corsage her mother had made and her hair has been freshly done by a hairdresser.

A recent graduate from art school, Parton was only a child during the 1980s, the period with which she seems preoccupied. The artist herself has described her fascination with this period as being about a time 'when I was wanting to go to balls - when I was 9 years old and watching all the high school kids go and wishing I was one of them'.

Emma Bugden