SANSOM 2007.117

Gareth Sansom came to prominence in the 1960s as one of Melbourne's more experimental artists. With an interest in the work of Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon and British Pop art, Sansom walked the line between figuration and abstraction in intensely personal works that were equally revealing of their time. 

In 1976, Sansom created controversy with a series of self-portraits in which, as he describes, ‘I began disguising myself as a woman because I felt it was the least predictable surprise . . . It was something completely unacceptable to the average Australian male’. For Sansom, cross-dressing released him from self-doubt and the responsibilities associated with maintaining a single fixed persona. Frame me soon 1976–77 dates from this period and includes photographs of Sansom, both in and out of drag, clustered around an amorphous form that implies a shifting sense of self. The iconography suggests that we have the capacity to generate many different expressions of ourselves, while the title references both the elusiveness of identity and the desire to lock it down.