For artist Christine Webster, ‘Photography is a performative medium and … the camera is a theatrical device.’¹ Christine Webster’s nuanced depictions of desire and gender expression — often using herself as subject — place her alongside feminist artists, such as Cindy Sherman and Annie Sprinkle, for whom performance is integral to their work. Even in her photographs of other models, Webster says, ‘I channel myself through people.’² Two photographs from the ‘A Serious Doll House’ series embody this practice; in these self-portraits, Webster portrays personae that hybridise or confuse various stereotypical gender roles.

The ‘Black Carnival’ series, from which two works held in the Collection are derived, comprises 50 life-size photographs. Conceived ‘as a continuous running ribbon of cibachromes that would encircle the viewer’,³ the series features a multicultural array of androgynous figures whose poses — often partially or totally nude — drew ‘critical and popular media’ attention in New Zealand at the time.⁴ In her catalogue essay for 2010’s survey exhibition ‘Provocations: The Work of Christine Webster’, Anne Kirker writes:

Under the guise of masquerade, [these photographs] challenge, complicate and confuse conventional sex roles and notions of gender. When on display, these figures, holding and adorned with a variety of props, play with parody, irony and re-appropriation. In their various representations, they return the viewer’s look confidently, sometimes brazenly.⁵

‘Black Carnival’ was installed at Queensland Art Gallery in 1996, in a quiet, darkened gallery ‘with a silently spinning mirror ball, the shadows from the mirror ball making long balloon shapes with strings to the floor’.⁶ In his introduction to a 1993 exhibition pamphlet, John Cranna writes: ‘“Black Carnival” is pitched somewhere between the mystical and the burlesque, and it has a scale and power that will leave the viewer disturbed and challenged. […] Webster’s dictionary of carnival is littered with words like transgression, display, desire and loss.’⁷

Webster sees the black background that is signature to many of her photographs as ‘a clean slate [… the models] are like apparitions appearing from darkness — dislocated from time or place. There is an attempt to create a kind of timelessness.’⁸ From the early 1980s, Webster’s photographs have responded to androgynous fashion-magazine photography,⁹ subverting the commercial and voyeuristic aims of the genre in order to challenge ‘society’s prevailing myths’ of gender and sexuality and ‘explore the politics of the female gaze’.¹⁰ In Black Carnival #45 and #47, cabaret performer Mika (aka Mika X) appears in two different poses that explore the body and fashion as sites of complex gender expression. Anne Kirker writes:

Christine Webster is an artist provocateur. She uses photography and the adult body to demonstrate the complexity of gender, power relations and psychological states of being. She meditates on sexuality, but goes further to plumb the depths of desire through subconscious narratives. At times the artist unsettles our vision with images of emotional distress and implied trauma in order for the viewer to accept that the human condition involves confronting belief systems and power positions that impact socially and, further, that when a life is lived fully and engaged it cannot but experience the ‘out-of-the-ordinary’, and despair as much as ecstasy.¹¹

The iterative process by which Webster made these images, which she called ‘de-processing’, further unsettles the viewer’s ability to locate the models of ‘Black Carnival’ and ‘A Serious Doll House’ in time and place. The original photographs, taken with a Hasselblad camera, were ‘printed to A4 size then photocopied up to A3 size’ and edited for colour and texture, before being ‘rephotographed onto a 4x5 transparency which was then printed and enlarged to life-size using Cibachrome paper’.¹²

Born in New Zealand in 1958, Webster relocated to the United Kingdom in 1997, where she has taught at the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University. Webster’s work has been exhibited widely in New Zealand and overseas, including in Australia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Germany.

Endnotes

1. Christine Webster, quoted in Anne Kirker, Provocations: The Work of Christine Webster [exhibition catalogue], Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, 2010, p.81.
2. Webster, quoted in Kirker, p.83.
3. Kirker, p.85.
4. Kirker, p.85.
5. Kirker, p.85–6.
6. Webster, quoted in Kirker, p.86.
7. John Cranna, Black Carnival [exhibition pamphlet], Dunedin Public Art Gallery, December 1993, ISBN 0-908910-03-7.
8. Christine Webster, interview with John Cranna, Black Carnival [exhibition pamphlet], Dunedin Public Art Gallery, December 1993, ISBN 0-908910-03-7.
9. Kirker, p.81.
10. Kirker, p.82.
11. Kirker, p.81.
12. Webster, quoted in Kirker, p.58.