Erin Harrington recently gave an illustrated talk at City Gallery Wellington, “Bodily Exchanges: Blondes, Beasts, and Body Swaps”, at the opening night of the exhibition CREATURE, by video artist Marianna Simnett.
The text of the talk is currently up on the gallery’s blog. “I want to address four of the many faces of this blonde archetype— the dream, the muse, the star, and the void.
Some of them are referenced directly in Simnett’s works—she is nothing if not a skilled magpie, lining her artistic nest with shiny things, images plucked strategically from film and art, stories kept alive in their retelling.
Others are clearly sisters to her characters and images. But all are part of the great pantheon of mythic, yet uncertain, blondes.”
This week Erin also contributed a popular article to The Conversation, previewing the most recent season of The Handmaid’s Tale.
She discusses how the show’s increasingly enthusiastic and unsettling representations of violence draw from torture-centric films of the 2000s and rape revenge narratives.
