'50 Shades of the Same Sexy Thing' / Sophie Dickinson

Sophie Dickinson’s work shuns the polite, the pristine and the civilised in favour of a deeper truth: the messy, discomfiting reality of bodily existence. Noses are picked, paddle pop sticks are licked, and faces contort into expressions so wildly communicative they border on obscenity. Any attempt to neatly define the boundaries of the body is shunned; teeth fall out, tongues curl from bloated purple lips, fingers invade noses. Not even the early morning commute is safe from bodily havoc- a gesture characteristic of weekday exhaustion drags the cheek downwards, exposing the mushy inner lining of the lower eyelid.

Sophie’s resolute commitment to broaching the superficial expresses itself in more ways than one. Her newest body of work, “50 shades of the same sexy thing”, takes aim at the embodied stereotype of superficiality itself: the high school queen bee. A recurring element within popular culture, (think Regina George and Kate Sanders) she’s hot, bitchy, top-of-the-food-chain, and more 2-dimensional than an IKEA flatpack. Mirrored in various iterations through the medium of printmaking, Dickinson places these characters where they rightfully belong- in templates of storyboards, where their artificiality is made self-evident. With a swift (but never surgical) cut, Dickinson’s work exposes both the inner workings of the body, and the blatant fakery of the vapid feminine archetype.

“50 shades of the same sexy thing” will be showing from May 29 – June 9 at Black Cat Gallery, Collingwood