Women are perhaps the most perfect photographic subjects ever. Without a word, they can convey as much hope, promise, fear and anger as a thousand of Bill Shakespeare's words. One artist whom is keenly aware of this is Brent Leideritz. In his new exhibition, entitled Real Women, Brent asks a different question with his art. Rather than questioning beauty or the nature of femininty, his contemporary and digitally retouched art questions the nature of modeling itself. Merge caught up with Brent to chat about Real Women ahead of the March 20th exhibition at Adelaide Central Gallery.

 

The basic concept of the show is to explore the nature of the fashion image and popular glamour photography and how everyone is being led to believe that everything in the magazines and on film is actually how it is rather than the complete fabricated bullshit that it really is.

 

Yeah… something similar to that. I’m kind of tying into that direction but doing a parody of it at the same time. And also different images within the show explore the theme of mortality, the nature of childhood memories and that kind of thing… makeup ads, body image, gender image… all that kind of thing in an effort to develop a nice overarching theme for people to think about. That’s the core beneath it all but then I want to let people make up their own minds, how they interpret the images. So I’ve kept the descriptions minimal so people can infuse it with their own ideas, rather than me leading them by the nose and going, “now you’re meant to think this about this one…” because it’s a naked suspended dead clown. People can make up their own minds about what the image is trying to convey.

 

 

 

That’s kind of the impulse behind it and that’s stemmed from my working as a graphic designer for years and just getting sick of hearing people going, “photoshoped images should be outlined as photoshoped images…” which is a government push.

 

Oh yeah, they’re trying to push the advertising industry into noting on all ads that it’s been manipulated, which to me seems silly because it’s pretty obvious when photos have been manipulated and when they haven’t.

 

Yeah I have a big hatred of the “orange generation” as I like to call them. In this exhibition pretty much every portrait is porcelain skin and fashion styles rather than everyone tanned and brown… and orange.

 

This has probably been developing in my head since 2005/2006 but the big push for getting it up has probably only occurred in the last six months, when I got a space out at Adelaide Central. It all sort of accumulated into a, “hey, I can actually do this show!” rather than just something I was going to do for a book initially.

 

 

 

 

It was originally a book concept but then there was a gap at the gallery. They changed curators and got a new CEO. The new CEO is bringing some new things into the gallery and taking some risks. They’re using this as a new show style and a new marketing approach because I’ve been doing a lot of online marketing and street press flyers. No one has every done the little square flyers like I’ve done.

 

Yeah, just trying to saturate the market. Do as much as I can. They rang me about some stuff I was storing out in their area and she rang me and I mentioned I was doing some stuff and she (the new CEO) said, “put something to us, we’ve got some gaps.” And yeah, it all fell into place.

 

 

 

Just whether I can sell the things given the nature of the size of them.

 

The smallest are 1m by 1.5m. And the bigger ones are 1.4m by 2.1m. They’re mounted onto diebond. So they’re big and the prices are reasonable but given the size they might be out of the price range of the average house space. There a single picture on a wall kind of thing. And the big ones are only going to fit in a hallway or in a big loungeroom space.

 

We’re hitting the hairdressing market and the pub market, hoping that some of the boutique pubs out there might be interested in them because they have the wall space. All the usual ones that are floating around.

 

I would say that this exhibition is the culmination of this particular style which has been developing over the last couple of years. Prior to this I was shooting on film, doing single light, more grungy approach to photography. Late 2005, early 2006 I started going OK well let’s use my design skills into the photography rather than keeping them separate. Because, up until that point, I was doing minimalists photoshoping. I was keeping it how it came out of the camera, shooting with portable floods and halogen lights to try and mimic studio without going to that direction to see if I could. I shot until I was happy and then I went and bought studio equipment.

 

 

 

I see it very much in the pop art direction. It’s not real. It’s not meant to be real. It’s a pretty picture that has a message if you want to read into it. If not… it’s a pretty picture. It’s not technically unique or new. It’s what every magazine out there does pretty much it’s just in a different forum and questioning whether or not if it’s on an art wall and 1m by1.5m is it more of an art piece than a full page in a magazine. And also tying in the makeup artistry of Mishka, my partner, in order to create something different.

 

There’s some really nice pieces that she’s done… and she’s done most of what’s in the show and there’s a few legacy shots from the early era. It’s largely been a collaboration in that sense that I can trust her. I have an idea and she knows what I want more or less and I let her just run with it. Bringing in friends as the models rather than professionals also ties in with the theme of body shape and image, where we use real women… people that have come off the street, friends you’ve known for years and make them look like they’ve come out of a magazine. You have to ask who are the models in the magazine? Are they just friends of friends, someone who knows someone? These days do you need to be a model to be used in advertising?

 

Yeah.