Becky Mair

becky@mair.freeisp.co.uk

With my installation ‘Eye Candy’, in which the space and models are controlled by myself, am I celebrating male beauty or the female viewer’s gaze at male beauty without any sexual innuendo or vulgarity? The male models are the subject matter and controlled by the artist. I am trying to treat the male in the same way the female has been seen; in other words the ideal spectator is female and the image of the male should be to flatter her. Attempting to reverse the statement made by John Berger in 1972, he wrote in Ways of Seeing, of our fundamental assumption to images of women:

“But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.” (Berger, 1972, p64)

 

I would like to thank

Lapel men’s hire for the sponsorship of the Dinner Jackets.

Gerry Court at Crucial Colour

Ben McGannan at Water for Work