Moira Lovell

Email:moira_lovell@hotmail.com

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Date exhibit:2007-11-11

Type exhibit:Exhibition |

The dual function of the girls' school uniform within our culture: firstly, to give homogeneous identity and to prevent competition between pupils; secondly, to offer up a sexualised and infantilised display of unthreatening female sexuality to the male gaze. Moira Lovell mixes the two as she in invites young women, who she has photographed whilst wearing provocative schoolgirl outfits in themed nightclubs around the city, to return to their secondary school gates in similar reveller's garb, and to strike a pose. The resulting photographs of these club-wisened alumni are oddly comic, but there is a more powerful feeling of pathos, nostalgia, and the acid tinge of naivety corrupted and exploited. 'Raunch Culture,' as Ariel Levy has called it, a failure to resist objectification and misogyny, is spliced with the playground, and Lovell's photographs abruptly report on how little seems to remain of the schoolyard's openness and curiosity. Yet the suggestion is also that schools, as themselves 'disciplinary' institutions, should be thought of, in a complex way, in relation to such dubious policing of sexual and social spheres.

The After School Club 2006-7 -Portfolio Magazine Review

Moira Lovell's series The After School Club revels in just such mixed messages and the testing of boundaries. Posing before the gates of their former schools, the young women in these photographs are dressed in school uniforms as adult party outfits for the 'school disco'. This nightclub phenomenon seems at once liberating, through the adoption of an alternative persona, in the carnival tradition, and yet is highly socially controlled. Dislocated from the night-time context of fancy dress and fetish, the women appear unsure of the role they must now play: by turns uncomfortable and forlorn, defensive and coy. As viewers we too feel the discomfort. In the cold light of day, in public, the infantilised sexuality is mildly disturbing. I am reminded of Diane Arbus's notion of the 'gap between intention and effect' that formed the core of her influential and sophisticated understanding of photography in the late 1960s. She noted how photographs ruthlessly pinpointed the threshold between how we think we appear and how we are actually perceived. The two states are often at odds, gaining potency from their conflict and uncertainty. - Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum London. Published in Portfolio Magazine issue 46, November 2007

Lovell graduated as an Artist in Residence with ArtyBird in 2007