🍕🙏🏾❤️
Sabella D'Souza
Gallery 3
Opening 05.06.19 6-8pm
Artist Talks 27.06.19 6-7pm
In 2008 Julia Roberts converted to Hinduism whilst on set in India for the Ryan Murphy film Eat Pray Love; the all-American girl next door has since come to embody a type of fetishized colonial spectacle through her co-option of brown spirituality.
🍕🙏🏾❤️ is concerned with the objects of our critical obsession, our celebrity embodiments and the consumption of the ready-made artist of colour. Roberts’ universal appeal embeds itself silently into pre-existing colonial frameworks of white supremacy on par with White Wellness™️ advocate and GOOP founder Gwyneth Paltrow. This insidious act seeks to superficially distance the white body from its privileges, subsuming into the mundane through an othering of brown practices of worship.
In this new body of work, Julia Roberts is a safe interlude, a respite from the unbearable violence of brown subjectivity in white spaces. Acting as a mask, Roberts’ identity gives the needed respite to air our entangled grievances, whilst mediating new ways in which queer people of colour can destabilise colonial spectatorship through insincerity, celebrity embodiment and disidentification.
Images
Sabella D'Souza, 🍕🙏🏾❤️, Firstdraft, 2019 Photo: Jessica Maurer
Sabella D'Souza, Julia & I, 2018
Julia & I (2018) was commissioned by Natasha Matila-Smith for Runway Experimental Art, Issue 38# SPECTACLE.
🍕🙏🏾❤️ was assisted by a grant from Create NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government. The NSW Artists’ Grant is administered by the National Association of the Visual Arts.
