Julia Trybala

Flesh / Gloss

Fort Delta, Melbourne, 23 November - 23 December 2017

Flesh / Gloss
Fort Delta, Melbourne, 23.11.2017 - 23.12.2017

Essay:
The pleasure of being a bit gross with someone else by Brigid Hansen
 

Trybala’s series of visual flesh negotiations float easily between intimate, explicit and erotic in a kind of coy, glossy painterly play. A closed-clasped finger pushes against an olive cigarette trouser belt, cloud-like marshmallow flesh expanding like thickening mousse over its tailored belt. Cause, effect. Jaundiced flesh, scarlet-rotting tangelo and dishwater green-grey tones converse between each glossed board in a corporeal production line.

 This body of work iterates a working body; playful, pressed, prodded and pulled. These gestures explore the exterior of the vessel-body in a kind of intimate detachment, an intentional ambiguity present as to whether the artist depicts self-pleasure or another’s interaction with the body/ies. There is an idea of romance imbued in the denoting of experience as intimate, versus the explicit act of laying a self bare. In this instance, the self-objectification and framing of personal bodily experience as abject materialises the depicted into both hyper and de-sexualised bodies. Pleasure structures and signifiers are explored as a nostril is nudged, belly fluff expunged, a finger hooked into the wound-orifice. Intimate and explicit are conflated into a subjective erotic where desire is materialised as a combination of objective and subjective perspectives.

 The de-gendered subject present in these works exists in constant relation with other corporeities and yet is not defined explicitly by these relations. Where Judith Butler describes sex as “...part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs”, Trybala’s purposeful attempt to separate sex and bodily demarcations of such circumvents these relational, binary power structures. Agency of a subject’s body is built through a consented, fluid imagery where flesh morphs and melts into a single entity made up of distinct, though reliant parts. Close-up and faceless framing renders the personal-abject as an act of resistance where the subject is irrecognisable. Imagery is built around an attempt to coagulate rather than differentiate.

 
Butler: Judith Butler. 1993. Bodies that matter.