In many of Georgina Cue’s photographs, the artist lies in a staged setting. She is surrounded by makeshift objects and structures, which are overloaded with a series of diverging allusions. “I think the challenge with all of the disparate references is not that it’s difficult for all of them to come together. I think that the challenge is not to make the photograph too derivative of one reference, because then I’m just recreating something that already exists,” says Cue, when describing her large-scale images.
While the Melbourne-based artist has only been creating staged photographs for the last few years (which are captured in her parents’ garage), the images have now come to define her current practice. In this podcast Cue unpacks the stories and symbolism behind the imagery. In particular, she discusses the influences of film noir and German expressionism, with her photographs often drawing upon films by Robert Wiene, as well as the Soviet film Aelita (1924).
Cue’s further references to classical Greek aesthetics, femme fatales and contemporary sportswear also serve as insights into how the female body has been viewed and projected throughout time.
“I think that particularly if you’re a female artist and you photograph yourself, that’s immediately saying something in the work and you’re bringing in a certain genre of self-portraiture that has quite a long history to it,” says Cue. “But hopefully the way I’m doing it isn’t that I’m trying to communicate one single opinion about how women have been portrayed.”
While Cue is continuing these investigations in her current exhibition Scenes, showing at Neon Parc, the show is notable for heralding a more nuanced shift in Cue’s practice. Now the artist is interested in capturing staged scenes that continually gesture towards still life, but no longer contain a human figure – something she further discusses in the podcast conversation.
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