Vanila Netto | kissmisswillcall

VANILA NETTO  
kissmisswillcall

EXHIBITION 6 March – 5 April, 2008

Vanila Netto mashes 70s glamrock iconography with the saccharine sweetness of Hallmark card greetings in this new site specific project. Incorporating multi-channel video works with wall based paintings and photography, Netto shoots declamatory overtures of redundancy and rejection.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I stumbled into KISS on a black and white TV news coverage - 'fuck' this is amazing - Scary, but compelling. Instead of being repulsed by fear, I wanted to see more of that. I can hardly describe the magnitude of the emotional impact from the 50 seconds of exciting new tunes performed by four guys dressed in Goth-glam attire, kabuki-like make-up and gesturing as if they were beasts on heat. I was a child in the mid-70s and until then my musical vocabulary had been limited to the Beetles, Bob Dylan and Billy Paul - still under the influence of my folks. Kiss' staged terror blew my mind. That chance confrontation with the unexpected, with the freshness that I had found in the theatrical and the fantastic. I noticed that life started to change for me in that moment, a moment that I still vividly remember.

kissmisswillcall
The saccharine sweetness of 'hallmark' card wisdom seems to be a safe, removed and successful way of expressing our love, our concern or any other emotion towards each other. We use on a daily basis text messages, emails, and face-to-face catch words and phrases like 'miss you', 'love you', 'you and your business means a lot to me', 'thinking of you', 'keep well' -  to communicate and celebrate the fakeness and insincerity of our personal expressions.

I am working with objects and images turned cliche due to their saturation as overconsummed items/signs in popular culture. Highly charged pop symbols such as the snow dome, the skull and the Kiss make-up masks are used as totems. The object becomes image as slogan for tension and some kind of resolution in simple body and time-based performance that leaves residues. These icons give me the much needed initiative bust to exorcise even if temporarily the prescriptive times and relationships I am involved with through punchy, fired-up stage chops - short declamatory overtures inflamed with an intense, energy-bound, good-natured vandalism. Bitterness is amassed through loopholes of raptures, masks and foursome words.

Vanila Netto
5 March 2008

Vanila Netto, neckhigh, 2008
digital video, 4:18  (video still, detail)

This project has been assisted by Arts NSW,  The Gunnery Studios Program and d/Lux/MediaArts