John Marchant Gallery is delighted to announce Selected Works, a solo exhibition by Rosy Martin. Encompassing a period of forty years the exhibition will present work from three distinct projects: Don’t Say Cheese Say Lesbian (1986) Outtakes (1996) and Beige, made in collaboration with Verity Welstead (2018-19) .
Encompassing the laminated exhibition, a solo portraiture project and a collaborative photo therapy work, the exhibition offers audiences an opportunity to explore Martin’s expansive and decades long engagement with the photographic medium. Archival documents and gallery talks will expand on elements of the artist research led practice.
The exhibition is curated by John Marchant and Linsey Young, with design by Emma Singleton.
Don’t say cheese, say lesbian, 1986
First exhibited at Pavilion Gallery Leeds in an exhibition curated by Kim Edwards.
In the early 1980’s Rosy Martin and Jo Spence (1934 - 1992) pioneered a new photographic practice, 'Re-enactment Phototherapy'. Don't say cheese say lesbian is an overview of early work from 1983-6 in which Martin is the director and subject.
Don’t say cheese say lesbian takes its title from a disparaging comment made by a Conservative MP. The work explores the social and psychic formations of identities within the drama of the everyday and the multiple complexities that go to make up personal life stories. This way of collaborative and therapeutic working aims for transformations and challenges the fixity of social and sexual roles. Through exploration of memories, identities and unconscious processes, re-enactment phototherapy expands the potential meanings and emotions that lie hidden and unspoken within domestic photography and the family album.
The work is a laminated exhibition, a series of panels combining photography, text and collage that was run through a large scale laminator giving it a durable, waterproof finish and negating the need for framing. The format was popular with photography collectives and artists associated with organisations such as Half Moon Photography Workshop / Camerawork, Cockpit Gallery, Blackfriars Photography Workshop and Wandsworth Photo Co-op. These groups were founded and run on socialist principles and many of their exhibitions took laminated form because they were cost effective and practical ways in which to make and disseminate ambitious projects. A large number of laminated exhibitions toured the country from the early 1970’s until the mid 1990’s and can be characterised by their flexibility. The exhibitions often expanded and contracted in size and elements of this work were also shown at exhibitions at the Brixton Art Gallery, Swiss Cottage Library and university art galleries. Laminate exhibitions were affordable to make and share and enabled unfunded practitioners to exhibit innovative new work without reliance on income or grants.
Out takes, 1996
Out takes continues Martin’s explorations of queer identity and gender as performance through her research into family albums, and what she found there.. The series encompasses an interplay between desire and deficiency, youth and age. The desire of a generation in the 1930's and 40's, supported by the collusion of hairdressers, clothes designers and high street photographers was to look like their chosen film star idols. Seductive, yet always tinged with a hint of failure, of pathos. Sometimes a question lingered, was this person also gay?
This question and a search for connection inspired Martin's self-portraiture performance of a range of gender styles and ages. Inhabiting marginal characters from family albums whose dress or mannerisms raised questions for the artist, Martin also found traces of her mother’s martyred smile, her father’s faith as a tailor 'if you dress right you can go anywhere'.
Studies in Beige - From the series Gravity Gravitas, 2018-19
Rosy Martin in collaboration with Verity Welstead
Utilising Re-enactment Phototherapy Martin and Welstead contest societal attitudes towards and representations of women and ageing from across their twenty-year age gap. Using humour, play and parody the ageing body is reconfigured as present, vulnerable, sympathetic, joyous and defiant.
In the moving image work Letting go they play with the idea of the ‘poor women’s facelift’. Staring directly at the camera the artists hold back their skin with their fingers until it is taught and line free. They then let go allowing their wrinkles to settle. In our patriarchal, capitalist society where women's youth and beauty is still revered this reads as a profoundly confident and confrontational act. What if we valued wrinkles? What if we searched each morning for new wrinkles as a sign of beauty? Could these images begin to reveal this shift to an acceptance of the realities of ageing rather than denial and inevitable failure?
Rosy Martin (b.1946) is an artist who works across photography, moving image, psychological therapy and writing. She has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and her work is held in collections including Tate and the Centre for British Photography.