JANINA GREEN

From the series Vacuum, 1993
Type C photograph

Vacuum is a set of 14 vintage chromogenic prints made in 1993 and originally shown at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

‘The middle class white housewife is the dominant model of femininity and her role has been constructed around domestic cleanliness. Her home has been the setting for her performance as virtuous wife and mother. But housework also taints the character of the woman, linking femininity with dirtiness and linking dirtiness to the “abject” and to those things we are constantly spitting out and wiping away’.

This twin notion of the feminine as simultaneously pure yet intrinsically soiled is at the heart of Janina Green’s densely collaged layered photographs with their richly retro modernist colour schemes of an idealistic era and a lone silhouetted figure in many of the works, drawing us into the present.

20 May – 11 June 2011

To be opened by: Naomi Cass,
Director Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm Thursday 19th May 2011

MARGARET LAWRENCE GALLERY
40 Dodds Street
Southbank Victoria 3006
T: +61 3 9685 9400

Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 12pm – 5pm
Saturday 1.00 – 4.00pm.

www.vcam.unimelb.edu.au/gallery