Christine Webster: Le Dossier (2012)

“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.”

In Le Dossier Webster is “intentionally erotic” placing “partially or fully naked women… in squalid interiors” which are “repulsive and beguiling at the same time.” There is an expository narrative linking works but each image is also final and complete. “Le Dossier is filmic; the performers act out a series of provocations. Three women (of whom the artist is one) engage in erotically charged actions that are highly troubling. There are hints of self-mutilation, of eyes and mouths bound, of references to a chateau in Toulouse where sexual rituals (including violence) occurred. Violence and death are implicit – a nurse figure outdoors is juxtaposed with close-ups of china funerary roses, decayed in overgrown grounds.” Then we are shifted and taken inside to rooms where peeling wallpaper acts as a metaphor of beauty and decay, where the pendulous symbol of an exposed light-bulb is charged with erotic tensions and there is the palpable sense of something having taken place that will come to happen again. Collectively, Le Dossier mocks “the photo-documentary tradition through their artifice and psycho-sexuality.” (1)

1. Anne Kirker, Recurring Currents, in Provocations The Work of Christine Webster, Christchurch Art Gallery, 2010 pp 81-89.