Queensland

Gerwyn Davies is an emerging photographic artist currently completing his Bachelor of Photography at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. In an intersection of constructed photography and the domesticity of sewing, he explores the dark corners of masculinity.

or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the cock

Gerwyn Davies subverts the hyper-masculine and preconceptions of the craft medium through aggressive and sexual environments.

Steel Town Disciples

Steel Town Disciples is a series of twelve constructed still life images offering tactile denim sculptures painted in light. In each still life image, totems of the ‘authentic’ man are stitched and shrouded using heavily gendered modes of craft. Chainsaws, working boots and saddles, trivial symbols of masculinity, are coated in denim and bound with thread against its hard form. The denim materials origin as a rugged and durable fabric bearing the hard labour of American cowboys, rebelling against authority in the 1950s before outfitting the working class heroes of Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Barnes is referenced and repositioned in a camping of popular notions of manhood.

This tactile and tough material quality of denim is transformed and repositioned in to a new still life context. Here, the assumed power of masculine iconography and symbolism are dissolved into eroticism and conflated with the romantic and delicate. Traditional still life representations of ripened fruit are inserted alongside these heavily constructed sculptures, contrasting their rigid form and fetishising the nature of the objects. Alternate elements of cream and bound rope aim to further intimate at an erotic exchange shifting the power and status of masculine ownership further away from the initial subject.

This series of work playfully interrogates the construction and performance of normative and dominant masculinities and their iconography and in doing so, aims to contest the authority of prevailing masculinities and their commonplace representations.

For more information, please visit Gerwyn Davies's website:
www.gerwyndavies.com