Présentation
Five Minutes After Birth is a body of work which responds to the social conditioning men experience in modern Western societies. Referencing anti-social behaviour, sexuality and traditional gender roles, this work presents both a critical and reflective response to men’s pursuit of power and control, and their inclination to engage in competitive and often harmful behaviours.
The process of becoming a man and adhering to social hegemony could be described as a practice of trial and error; a perpetual cycle of aspirational endeavours and inevitable failures. Presenting masculinity as a performance and a culturally reproduced identity, this work highlights the fragility of this cycle and the difficulty men have in describing and accounting for this shared identity.
Amongst the images I have included interviews with millennial men asking them to explain what it means to be a man. I ask them not to use linguistic shortcuts such as the words, ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, etc… in order to provoke a more descriptive response but also to highlight our reliance on such terms. The redactions in the texts are where my interviewees have accidentally used one of these words.
Far from being a celebration of the plurality of masculinities, these works are a meditation on dated but prevalent masculine archetypes and the disruption and questioning they are increasingly subject to. Using masculinity as an identity to deconstruct, this work poses broader questions about social hierarchies, shared narratives and increasingly polarised discourses around such subjects.