About Bianca Barling

Velvet imaginings

Enmired in political and allegorical traditions, as well as a hoard of overblown ideologies pertaining to the erotic, contemporary representations of female sexuality can often succumb to a kind of inertia. An astute consideration of this damned if you do, damned if you dont framework, permeates the artwork of Bianca Barling.

Wary of duplicitous depictions of the feminine, Barlings lush video works and installations expertly weld models and their environments together in languid and perverse melodramas. Utilising sensual devices, stylised costumes, dramatic makeup, along with evocative soundtracks and monumentally heightened timeframes, she subsumes feminine cinematic and photographic traditions, calling on the viewer to reconsider what pleasure for a woman might actually be.

Barling's earlier works were elegant, prettier, and seemingly more vulnerable but these tropes have steadily taken a darker and more determined turn. For her 2005 solo exhibition at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Barling referenced soft-core vampire movies by including two dissolute but glamorous females who lay dead throughout the opening, apparently depleted by their own carnality.

Her new video work too, evokes a gothic sensibility that could hint at paternalistic theories on nature, the sublime and ideas of the monstrous feminine. However, its slightly depraved, velvet imagery is more likely to situate itself towards the imaginings of Angela Carter, or Poppy Z. Brite, a potentially more complex devolution, where post-modern ideology crashes into the unresolved attractions of porn. Unbecoming behaviour becoming, Im coming.

Writing by Katrina Simmons

Artist's CV (Word doc, 40kb)