Slugs, Snails, and Puppy Dogs’ Tails

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, 2013 – 2014

Pretty, passive princesses; wicked, warty witches, evil stepmothers and jealous sisters overwhelmingly structure the stories of dated and modern Western fairytales as well as video games and mainstream fantasy films. Sometimes girls and women are absent altogether. How might this shape the perceptions of children regarding the ‘nature’ and desires of girls, boys, and their interactions? Such a deeply enforced heteronormative binary leaves little freedom for diverse gendered and sexual identities, such as female masculinities and lesbian attraction. With a twist to the traditional, images and phrases from a collection of recent and classic children’s books, photographs from National Geographic magazines, and found materials such as cicada wings playfully converge upon unfamiliar contexts within these collages.

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “The clash of steel rang out as the powerful princess fought the Beast”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “‘I shall eat you this minute’ roared the creature – as quick as a cat she whirled around and chopped the beast in two”
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “Stardust flickered in the gloom – poison chocked the air – he let out a growl that would have frightened the bravest of soldiers. The fierce young woman snarled with passion ‘I’ll bow to no man'”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “And with a smile she took her hand'”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “The brave young girl stood stiffly at attention with a mischievous twine in her eye”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “Safe with me my love'”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “In the middle of a dark, moonlit wood she was spellbound by her wit and grace – she fell deeply in love with her and the couple soon married.”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “Thunder echoed and the earth trembled – surrounded by a blaze of light she began her adventure…”
Mixed media collage

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “Soon they left the city and wandered into the desert beyond. There she found the Beast and drew her sword”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “There was a tremendous flash and the roar became louder and louder”
Mixed media collage
Price: $60

 

Desiree Tahiri
Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails, series of 12, 2013 – 2014
Reads: “She was extremely clever, brave and spent her time getting up to mischief”
Mixed media collage

Below the Knees

Desiree Tahiri
Below the Knee, series of 4, 2014
Gelatin silver photograph, hand printed on glossy fibre paper
27.5 x 35 cm, framed: 36.5 x 38.5 cm
Price: $90

Desiree Tahiri
Below the Knee, series of 4, 2014
Gelatin silver photograph, hand printed on glossy fibre paper
27.5 x 35 cm, framed: 36.5 x 38.5 cm
Price: $90

Desiree Tahiri
Below the Knee, series of 4, 2014
Gelatin silver photograph, hand printed on glossy fibre paper
27.5 x 35 cm, framed: 36.5 x 38.5 cm
Price: $90

Desiree Tahiri
Below the Knee, series of 4, 2014
Gelatin silver photograph, hand printed on glossy fibre paper
27.5 x 35 cm, framed: 36.5 x 38.5 cm
Price: $90

Desiree Tahiri
Below the Knee, 2014

A command concerning women’s clothing lengths in regards to cultural conceptions of ‘appropriateness’ – the area ‘below the knee’ is a so-considered unthreatening bodily site. The ideals and rules and that construct an ‘appropriately’ gendered, ‘beautiful’ body often go unspoken – indirectly instructed and internalised from the first moments of human consciousness. One disciplines the self, subconsciously or otherwise, to invest time and money into the body to perform a ‘correctly’ gendered appearance in order to reap social rewards and create a body of cultural value. Calves, shins and feet – ‘below the knees’, are not sites exempt, and may perform as personal sites of resistance, brewing with disruptive potential. 

Heel

This is a recent work of mine which was on display in the Sugar and Spice: The Gendered Body exhibition at Studio 19.

Desiree Tahiri
Heel, 2014
Bees wax, stilettos, metal pipes, wood, human hair, digital video
For sale: $250

    

A pair of high heels in contemporary Western culture is a fashion necessity. Strutting down the catwalk or clunking across polished office floors, high heels are designed to mould the female body into an ideal of the male gaze – legs lengthened, back curved, bottom out and breasts up. Movement is restricted and highly controlled. Physically, the body may become ‘down at the heels’; there are many associated health issues with the regularly contorted posture constructed by heels such as stiffened tendons and shortened calf muscles. On the contrary, there may be a striking sense of power embedded within these everyday objects. As heels grow taller women may literally tower over others and ‘down at the heels’ may adopt a new meaning. According to one article in a glossy 2012 issue of leading fashion magazine Marie Claire entitled ‘Is He Beneath You?’, quoting a 2008 journal study amongst undergraduates, 96% of women prefer heterosexual relationships in which they are shorter than their male partner. Communicating a range of messages about male dominance and deep-seated patriarchal tradition, it is often touted that tall women must not wear high heels. A complex object, the high-heeled shoe may be interpreted in oppressive and transgressive ways – who is being brought to heel?

Reference:
DeNisco, A., 2012, ‘Is he Beneath You?’, Marie Claire, pp. 93 – 95

   

Tough as Nails

Desiree Tahiri
Tough as Nails, 2014
Digital video (4 mins)

The attentive painting of another’s fingernails might be seen as a therapeutic indulgence; the interaction between two individuals and the psychological space it creates between them meaning more than the actual product provided. A pair of rugged, worker’s hands are lusciously lacquered by a pair of tender hands – the former carrying masculine connotations while the latter more feminine, and an at times testy conversation ensues. Perhaps feeling their masculinity is called into question by this ritual socially prescribed as feminine within Western society, a somewhat defensive attitude is assumed by the scarlet-nailed pair of hands playing up hegemonic ‘macho’ sensibilities. Between their discussion, quieter, almost still scenes of the rugged character’s apartment fleetingly flicker with vague connections to the subtitled words, as though distantly triggered reminders or memories. These snippets of domesticity perhaps communicate a different reality, calling into question illusionary exteriors and gendered expectations.

‘Boy’s Club’

Desiree Tahiri
Boy’s Club, 2013
digital image projection with audio (7:10 mins)

An image of a young boy positioned within a studio clumsily pointing a toy pistol documents his look of unease. Spoken over the image of his past are the vivid childhood memories of this youth – my father – and narratives of boyish masculinity internalised and policed through the various “courage tests”, cheeky mischief, wrangle-ups and reflections of his sister – simultaneously expanding and restricting connotations within the image and disrupting possible face-value readings of a distanced, documentary nature. Within the context of a 1960’s – 1970’s increasingly Americanised West Germany within which my father spent his childhood, the construction of masculinity was – and remains – strongly influenced by the media – films playing a particular role within this context. Echoes of a John Wayne classic, a cowboy Western series Bonanza – in German, and snippets of the original King Kong – once secretly watched with wide eyes through the bedroom keyhole – nostalgically fade in and out beneath a matured, recounting voice. A further link to the past is made through the subtle background flow of Lili Marlene – a German love song popularised during the second world war on both sides, which my father remembers hearing, as a child, from his father’s record player, and later marching to the tune as a young adult during compulsory military training.

The perhaps restrictive accounts of a macho masculinity interpreted and internalised by children within the subject’s context resonates on some levels with the dominating, patriarchal idealisation of hegemonic masculinity within a more modern discourse of continuity and change. On a more sombre level, making connections with the pistol uncomfortably griped in the small hands of this child are clips of recent news announcements regarding child shootings in the U.S. – where children – overwhelmingly boys – as young as 3 have been intentionally or inadvertently granted access to guns and accidentally killed someone.

From the cowboy films and childhood fighting games my father once played, and more recently the robust, through to the recent, masculinised gun culture in the U.S. – in which some states actively advertise the sale of brightly coloured blue, pink or glittered guns for young children – hegemonic narratives of masculinity have and still are to a large extent constructed as hard, angry and dominating.

Menagerie

Working with the curious treasure trove of photographs printed on the pages of a found collection of National Geographic magazines dating back to the 1970s and ‘80s, Menagerie playfully recontextualises a loaded visual culture exploring postcolonial politics of representation. Many of the images and articles contained within these magazines operate as ethnographic documents of animals and people with undertones of Western neo-colonial orientalism; sentiments which, as Parameswaran (2002) writes, still implicitly operate within the visual and linguistic discourses surrounding globalisation and global cultures in these magazines.

Desiree Tahiri
Menagerie, (series of 7), 2013
Inkjet print and sound
Sound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5GmBebXgw

Cultures prescribed as ‘outside’ of the West were often within these magazines constructed through Eurocentric orientalist discourses of tradition, authenticity, and the exotic as ‘Other’, and are deeply gendered according to prevailing patriarchal ideologies of the period; there is a strong absence of women depicted in any position of power. These notions are also evident, however subtly, in the discourse of the camera advertisements interspersed throughout the magazines. The cameras are coded with prestige, and – often discussed as tools of photojournalistic capacity – construct deep divides between the observer and the observed; the human and ‘nature’. Postmodern understandings of the ‘natural’ reveal the category as a “constantly reinvented rhetorical construction”, shaped by philosophical, scientific and journalistic commentators (Baker, 2000, p. 9). Nature’s relation to the ‘human’ world is culturally and historically mediated, postmodern thinking sceptical of hierarchical, taxonomical construction and classification of the ‘animal’ to “make it meaningful to the human” (Baker, 2000, p. 9).

Desiree Tahiri
Menagerie, (series of 7), 2013
Inkjet print and sound
Sound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnKHFzqq9UM

Switching between analogue and digital methods, there is a sense of hybridity in the process of Menagerie’s construction. The modern contextual settings were photographed in film and subsequently digitalised; the human-animal characters were meticulously cut from the pages of the National Geographic magazines, assembled by hand and scanned. The two elements were then digitally merged while created or collected sounds were orchestrated into audioscapes for each image. Boundaries between the human and the animal are blurred in their hybrid combinations and interactions. As characters once documented by an orientalist gaze within the context of the magazine stories, they have been empowered through their recontextualised position within contemporary spaces. They become explorers, tourists and documenters, in which a female character in almost every image wields the powerful tool of representation so often advertised within these magazines – the handheld camera.

Desiree Tahiri
Menagerie, (series of 7), 2013
Inkjet print and sound

Desiree Tahiri
Menagerie, (series of 7), 2013
Inkjet print and sound

References:

Baker, S., 2000; The Postmodern Animal, Reaktion, London, p. 9

Parameswaran, R., 2002; ‘Local Culture in Global Media: Excavating Colonial and Material Discourses in National Geographic’, Communication Theory, vol. 12, iss. 3, pp. 287 – 315

Collages

Desiree Tahiri
Greetings, 2013
Mixed media collage
16 x 20 cm
for sale – $25

 

Desiree Tahiri
Mine, 2013
Mixed media collage
17 x 21.5 cm
for sale – $25

Some new collages I constructed using the vivid imagery of old National Geographic magazines, along with a variety of other materials… from the honeyed chai tea I was sipping, to popped aluminium pill packaging. These were made in the spacey spirit of excitement surrounding the 50th anniversary of the classic sci-fi series Doctor Who.

 

Work in progress…

Desiree Tahiri
Untitled, 2012
Scanned film photograph

Here are two scanned film photographs I recently took that will form part of a series I am working on for a photography class at uni. The focus of the class is on assemblage, and these images are two out of six that will act as backgrounds for a collage. Will post progress soon!

Desiree Tahiri
Untitled, 2012
Scanned film photograph

 

Untitled

Desiree Tahiri
Untitled, 2012
Scanned film photograph

Desiree Tahiri
Untitled, 2012
Scanned film photograph

These two scanned film photographs are from an ongoing series I began working on in 2012 documenting a delightful family with whom I spent some time and have an ongoing connection with. Their family, small yet never without a dull moment, consists of a teenage boy with a great love of ABBA who has cerebral palsy, his foster mother and carer, a very young girl with cerebral palsy who temporarily lived with them, a large number of friendly cats, and incredibly loyal dog. I spent a day assisting the teenage boy and young girl during a day out in the park, pushing their wheelchairs, spending time talking to them, and playing with the little girl who had a great sense of humour and the most joyful laugh. The then family of three (now two since the little girl has moved out of the state to another home) deeply touched me in different ways. The two young individuals really embrace life, feeling great enjoyment and gratitude for the small acts of kindness they receive from their endlessly compassionate carers and extended family. Their foster mother is amazing, donating so much of her affection and attention to them. She struck me as a very special and inspiring individual, and was so warm and welcoming towards me. I plan on spending some time with the gorgeous family to help out and perhaps take a few photographs in between again soon.

Excerpt – Dinner Scene

Here is a 1 minute excerpt from a short film in progress by Emanuela Cupac and myself – we’ve been working together as a production team and are having a lot of fun with this project. (This is just a quick, low quality copy of a section of our film – the final product hopefully soon to come!)

Production Team – Emanuela and Desiree