Sometimes the most ordinary objects carry the richest meaning. Human hair, the most primitive extension of our body, both revered and reviled, has long fascinated artists, and the new exhibition Hair Pieces at the Heide Museum brings together 38 artists from eight countries who use hair as medium and central theme. exploring its originality and power through sculpture, photography, conceptual and performance art. It is strange. Even a little scary. It’s also extremely gripping.
Curator Melissa Keys first had the idea for this exhibition ten years ago; She had friends who “run a commercial gallery in a former hair salon studio” and ideally wanted to plan more hair-related exhibitions, she said.
“This is a huge issue,” he says as he walks around the area. “A lot of artists work with this material, so there are a lot of show opportunities. I wanted this to be clear and meaningful rather than comprehensive.
Although Hair Pieces initially seems like an oddity, a strange cabinet of curiosities, it soon becomes clear that hair has a lot to say about human history, race, and gender. JD Okhai Ojeikere’s photographic series Hairstyles, depicting the intricate and detailed hairstyles of Nigerian women, reflects the country’s glory years after its independence from the British Empire. Magnificent sculptural hairstyles have been around throughout colonial history and act as a powerful symbol of reclamation and pride.
Johannesburg artist Kemang Wa Lehulere’s 2012 video installation Pencil Test 2 questions taxonomy and racial categorization in a video loop in which the artist appears jovial but, out of context, slides pencils through her hair. In South Africa in 1950, authorities used the “pen test” to reinforce racial hierarchies; if the pen placed in a person’s hair fell out easily, it was classified as white, but if it remained in place, it was classified as “black”. , “Indian” or “colored” and were denied basic human rights.
Gender and feminism feature strongly in much of the artwork, perhaps inevitably with such controversial and objectified material. Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens has created a collection of aluminum briefs and pieces called Warrior Woman, with a large human hair phallus emerging from the crotch. They cleverly subvert gender expectations. Julie Rrap’s Horse’s Tale from her 1999 Porous Bodies series cleverly evokes Lee Miller. Louise Weaver and Peter Ellis fold Kim Novak’s hairstyle from Hitchcock’s Vertigo into a powerful sculptural installation called Leonardo’s Dream. It’s a pretty loaded film, given the film’s obsessive fetishization of hair as the center of male control and desire.
In many works, there is a fascinating tension between hair as an expression of individuality and a kind of disembodied anonymity. Rosslynd Piggott’s painting Unknown Woman – From China to Brixton and Elsewhere is a brooch made from a woman’s hair that the artist purchased at Brixton Market in London. Jim Dine’s Braid is a detailed drawing of a braid cut from the head of an unknown woman. Charlie Sofo and Debris Facility have created a gorgeously colorful collection of found and discarded scallops in a grim yet touching ode to self-care; Some still have strands of hair left on them.
Surrealists, and the symbolists before them, understood and embraced the eerie, grotesque quality of using human hair. Works by Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning depicted hair as uncontrollable, stubborn and almost sentient. Hair Pieces taps into this surrealist vein, with many artists deliberately leaning into the uncanny: Melbourne artist Christina May Carey’s Hypnagogia, the exhibition’s opening work, consists of a series of screens and monitors showing pigtails mixed with images of mouse tails. A large photograph of the artist’s eye looks out onto the stage, black wires resembling strands of hair. It draws on Carey’s struggle with sleep paralysis and clearly evokes André Breton’s “wild eye,” the disembodied pupil that haunted surrealists from Dali to Magritte.
Perth-based artist Tarryn Gill’s Guardian depicts a small figure covered in thick layers of blonde hair, from which emerges a set of teeth that are both endearing and repulsive. This piece has a sort of inverted twin in John Meade’s self-portrait as Mary Magdalene; thick black hair covers a tiny figure, its hands and feet molded from the artist’s own, with a material called Reducit, which shrinks as it dries. Both bring to mind Cousin It.
Hair Pieces ventures into dark territory: Wes Placek’s Hairs of Murdered Women, one of a series of photographs taken at Auschwitz in 1975, and Edith Dekyndt’s Native Shadow, depicting a human hair flag commemorating slave ships in Martinique, are particularly brutal.
But it’s also fun. Taiwanese artist Shih Yung-Chun’s Knitting Cabinet is a vintage dresser filled with individual animal and human heads, staring unblinkingly at the viewer with thick woolly hair extending out from the back. And Lou Hubbard’s hilariously absurdist art books obsessively cut and paste the hair of disgraced Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and Monica Lewinsky.
There are also works by great artists like Patricia Piccinini and Marina Abramovic, but what feels most successful about Hair Pieces are the strange connections between the works. An exhibition that reveals and weaves our most basic and unconscious memories about hair, its psychological, mythological and even spiritual dimensions. It will make you think twice before booking your next haircut.