Athena in Thorns

Athena Thebus

Opening 02.11.16 6-8pm
Artist Talks 25.11.16 6-7pm

This show is another iteration of reckoning with shame, perforating my ideas of self, that has become a critical aspect of my practice.
I move through shame as a method to identify and collapse capitalist pragmatics. Here I am addressing the shame I once had with my Filipina ancestry.

A pair of foam platform wedge heel flip-flops serves as a viscera in moving through questions of class, culture, and gender. Implicit in this pair of flip-flops is a femininity that runs through my maternal lineage and that I recognised in other Filipina women around suburban, south side Brisbane. It was once a sticky point of shame. Now I use it to wade through the various tensions this kind of femininity pulls at, both sexually and politically, against and within my queer body.

One of the main questions in developing this work is: how can reckoning and queering with this shame of Filipina femininity and ancestry decentralise capitalistic, patriarchal ideals? In addressing points of shame the aim is to shift those shameful feelings brought on by living in this capitalist patriarchy towards adoration. This brought about other questions of how, as a queer mestiza living in Australia, do I honour my ancestry? How productive is honour – if within my filo side there is a bloodline of colonisation, an appetite for capital, and embodied whiteness*?

Sullenness, despondence and disobedience are tools that I use in the initial stages of coming to my own terms, or severing ties with this capitalist patriarchy. However, in this queering it is more a question of finding pleasure in honouring and abiding to my filo-ness. This exhibition brings elements of my family home, specifically my mothers taste in décor, which I see as a prime example of camp (earnest), reconfigured in an affect of queerness. It is an atmosphere that is simultaneously familiar and imagines a futurity where I feel at ease to move through.

*I have plenty of this already and trying purge.