If I’m going to hell you’re coming with me appears as if it’s been brought to life exactly as it was in a dream, no restrictions or limits. This is a fiction of artmaking, of course, and yet Justene Williams’s exhibition shows Knulp to be a space where artists can engage the expectations of an audience and the fictions of artmaking. Inside the space, a rasping whisper says, “You know what paradise is? It’s a lie, a fantasy we create about people and places as we’d like them to be…I’ve been to Paradise, but I’ve never been to me.” Instead of Charlene, there’s a small screen on the floor showing a mannequin wearing a heart-shaped bustier. Her eyes are rubbed around the edges with black liner, and her large plum lips move as she speaks, but her face doesn’t crease or wrinkle. A second screen shows the mannequin lying in a foetal position, her body abstracting into swirling solids and fluid shapes. Layers of red and pink come up too, a kind of virtual womb space.
Gabrielle Chantiri is a writer from Sydney.
