Desire Path | Karla Marchesi
8 - 26 June, 2022
Desire Path reflects upon a dissonance between subjective hedonic desire and modalities of pleasure in contemporary social life. The exhibition strides this rocky terrain taking the ancient Greek goddess of mirth, Baubo, as a guide, tragicomically exploring the pitfalls of modern dating and relationships.
Known for her liberated sexuality and bawdy humour, the Baubo empowers female agency, the ability of the vagina to critique power, identity and relationships. Marchesi employs the ‘impossible bouquet’ as a genre through which to theatrically critique the complexity of human experience and deconstruct ideological systems which envelope this contemporaneity.
Within a playground of Rococo excess, arrangements of succulents and flora colourfully brim with innuendo. Situated atop pastoral landscapes and set inside modern heterotopic interiors, the exhibition stages anthropomorphised cacti and flora as vessels for psycho-sexual projection.
Symbolic of violence, danger, and self-protective vulnerability, these great asinine masses of succulents drive Marchesi’s post-modern collage using autobiographical references, ancient myth, folklore, art history, sci-fi landscapes and cyber aesthetics, in a spirited Baroque-punk upending of Romanticism.
