Alexandra Peters: Dead/Quiet
“It is no longer my face (identification), but the face that has somehow been given to me (circumstantial possession) as stage property.” — Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium
Alexandra Peters scoops me up in her janky grey Subaru Forester almost every time we meet. She entered my artworld orbit around 2014 when she was studying fashion at RMIT. It was a potent period for a subcultural convergence of Melbourne’s artists, designers, musicians, and even skaters. Fashion adjacent ARIs such as Centre for Style, Rare Candy, and Monica’s Gallery provided significant cultural territory, at least enough for a teenager like me to access it and feel welcomed. Today, “expanded design” is perhaps our closest attainment of commercial cultural hegemony, in which montage and image reproduction reign supreme.
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Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) is a film without images—just a luminous ultramarine field and an evocative soundtrack. Made as he was dying of AIDS-related illness, Blue resists spectacle, embracing abstraction, memory, and loss. Thirty years on, it continues to evolve, expanding across artists, mediums, and generations.
Melbourne’s art scene is fertile ground for Tall Poppy proliferation and carnage.
