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Featured photographer
Moira Lovell
The After School Club series shows young women taken from school-themed
nightclubs and returned, still wearing their fancy dress, to a new but
not totally irrelevant environment.
The school uniform, as worn in the clubs, offers up a sexualised and infantilised display of unthreatening female sexuality to the male gaze. Within the education system it aims to provide a homogeneous identity to prevent competition between pupils. Here, Raunch culture is spliced with the playground, as the photographs abruptly report on how little seems to remain of the schoolyard’s openness and curiosity.
The models are not directed, rather they are allowed to perform. Taken
during daylight hours, outside empty out-of-hours schools creates an uneasy
setting for the models. One could easily presume that it’s the
morning after the evening before. Outside of their theatre they struggle
to get into their role. The resulting photographs are oddly comic, as
the girls appear self-conscious but there is a more powerful feeling of
pathos, nostalgia, and the acid tinge of naivety corrupted and exploited.
Moira Lovell has been commissioned by Pavilion to produce a new body of
work
for exhibition as part of the Pavilion
Commissions Programme 2008.
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| The After School Club, 2006/7 |
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