EMMALINE ZANELLI
PLEASE TOUCH

25 June – 23 July, 2016

Emmaline Zanelli is an emerging artist from Adelaide whose practice explores absurdity and sensuality in human interactions. She uses an experimental approach to image making in which sculpture, photography and performance are messed with, merged and layered.

In Please Touch, Zanelli plays with ideas of privacy, power, connection and sexuality. In mundane domestic settings she covers herself with enlarged images of her own skin that she has printed onto papers and fabrics. In these small performances her actual body is substituted with its own image, an act that explores the photograph itself - the space it represents and the physical space it occupies.

In Weak Spot, for instance, Zanelli’s foot tentatively reaches toward a computer mouse from underneath a shroud that is printed with an orifice—perhaps a belly button? Her disembodied flesh is echoed by a cow skin rug, which provides a surrogate skin for the tiled floor. In Hypersensitive she levitates in a corner, her body largely hidden behind a follicle-covered print. The lurid green of crumpled paper beneath her creates an improvised indoor garden in which a freestanding, over-sized bitter melon suggestively points in her direction.

With their enlarged pores and stubby hairs, these works are comical, sensuous and slightly disturbing. They heighten our awareness for how photography shapes our response toward its subject, especially when it comes to the objectification of the female body. Fragility is suggested in these performances and the titles of the works, but is also subverted with humour. In a time when our human interactions and our experiences of images are increasingly immaterial, Please Touch offers a playful and disquieting exploration of the relationship between the photograph and the body.

Zanelli has been actively exhibiting around Adelaide since 2010. During the 2015 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival she was awarded the Centre for Creative Photography Latent Image Award, and was also invited to give a presentation about her work as part of the Artist's Voice forum weekend at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She was selected for the 2016 Helpmann Academy South Australian Graduate Exhibition where she was selected as the inaugural winner of the Helpmann Academy Watson Award. In May this year, Zanelli’s work was included in the 2016 HATCHED National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts as one of the top 34 Visual Arts graduates in Australia. She is working towards a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia’s (CASCA)’s project space in 2017.