Performances and Interventions
Don’t Worry I’m an Artist, 2017
Roving performance at Cementa, 2017, photos by Gus Armstrong
Dreaming a New Reality, 2017
Performed at MCA Artbar Curated by Elena Papanikolakis and Kynan Tan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Persona and Performance in Everyday Life, 2014
Performed as part of SafARI LIVE, 2014 at The Cross Art Projects, ALASKA Projects, The Corner Cooperative & SafARI Launch
Photographs Alex Wisser
Linda Brescia is an artist who works across media, defying sinple descriptions and vanquishing spatial limitations. Her work is performance-based, but also incorporates printmaking, sculpture, installation and photography. Living and working as an artist in Western Sydney, Brescia uses her practice to convey some of the challenges she faces in her multiple roles of artist, wife and mother.
Linda’s proposal for SafARI 2014 was unusual in its forthrightness and clarity of expression. These are also attributes of her work, which cuts straight to the viewer’s heart and directly engages their compassionate and empathetic responses. There is honesty in her work, which somehow, despite its use of roleplay, manages to discard artifice and superficiality.
One of the aspects of daily life that Brescia confronts is the invisibility of the middle-aged woman in Australian society. Her experiences of life in the suburbs resonates with the personal histories and stories of many Australians. As a mother and wife, Brescia also reflects the extraordinary, unsung heroism of many Australian women, who quietly manage multiple responsibilities and dependents, whiel receiving little or no gratitude or accolades. This is a reality for countless women across the globe and, in her performances, Brescia is paying homage and offering a small recompense to the faceless, anonymous, unrecognised women of the world.
For the viewer, Brescia’s performances can be confronting. Her masks allow her to view the observer, to engage and speak with them. This blurring of the traditional lines of performance, a disintegration of the boundaries of social convention, allows Brescia not only to perform but also observe. The artist has mentioned the component of her work that only she can see: the reactions and verbal interactions between herself and her viewers. Whether these will be integrated or recorded in some way in the future remains to be seen.
Brescia describes her performance as fitting somewhere between the works of Leigh Bowery and Julia Child. For SafARI LIVE, she inhabited two different female personas across three performances. One character was a domestic and quasi-religious icon, a housewife goddess wearing a veil made from Chix wipes and sometimes a crown of coloured dishwashing sponges. The other identity was a more classicised female figure: an archetypal, stylised nude, albeit more active and mobile than the objectified female nude that recurs throughout art history. Brescia’s reanimation of this figure is a wonderfully confronting act, and these performances reached deep into out cultural conditioning, posing some uncomfortable questions about what we think a woman should be, and how she should act in the public realm.
Christiane Keys-Statham
Originally published in SafARI 2014, by SafARI Initiatives Inc., Sydney, pp 80-83; as part of the exhibition SafARI 2014 , which took place at six venues across Sydney 14 March - 4 April 2014.
Parramatta Mission Series, 2013-2015
