Motherboard Olympus
Installation, Logan Art Gallery and Pine Rivers Regional Gallery, 2011
Kitchen objects, yarns, furniture, lights, disco ball, wedding dress trash can lid, pearls and beads, and metal grids (9m x 7m room)
In Motherboard Olympus, the centrepiece of this installation, Zantis is inspired by word play and the conventional cultural assignment of gender to inanimate objects. The idea for this work came from a conversation Zantis had with an IT consultant who was repairing her computer. The IT consultant informed the artist that the motherboard was clearly at fault. Zantis replied without hesitation “typical – blame the mother!” Zantis’ humanised Motherboard wears a garish train of lantana like tulle, decorated with the artist’s trademark knitted vulvas and wrapped kitchen utensils. Perched on her throne of white leather and with a metal halo, she appears as the Madonna of the digital age.
At the same time, her kitchen trimmings, teats and vagina-covered gown channel the Madonna of popular culture. The soft voluptuous layers of tulle, ripe fleshy pearls and pink fluffy “lady bits” radiate an empowered female sexuality and sensuality as well as a confident authority. The relationship of power and sexuality is complimented in the surrounding works: Facebook Matrix, World Wide Web, Laptop and Cookies, which pursue the implications of security and control in the digital era. In Cookies Zantis’ Cookie Cutter Girls are suspended in cages, with their vulvas safety-pinned closed to form chastity belts- a confronting visual pun on the computer’s anti-virus security software, which cannot help also alluding to sadomasochism and genital mutilation.
Zantis is challenging us to adopt a playful but at the same time questioning stance. The exhibition is a riotously over-the-top, brash assemblage of the supposedly feminine. But it is also an inquiry into the layers of cultural meaning that shape our assumptions about gender and power.
Domestic Goddess
Exhibition, Artisan Brisbane, 2011
Kitchen cupboard and kitchen draw front panels, cookie cutters, yarns, pearls, and beads (2m x 3m room)
Chrys Zantis’ Domestic Goddess is influenced by feminist theory and mythology, and investigates art’s possibilities in the wake of feminism, the role of traditional female crafts in conceptual art and in the construction of contemporary female identity. By mixing the traditional domestic craft of knitting with the language of contemporary art, Zantis endeavours, on one hand to empower the female body by creatively redeploying an activity that previously symbolised women’s repression.
Domestic Goddess looks at the ritual, seduction, romantic notions, and power that reside in the domestic kitchen. The intent for these carefully knitted, crocheted and beaded sculptures is to seduce the viewer, to entice due to their detail and construction.
The choice of colour and material alludes to safety and comfort, yet within the sculptures of Domestic Goddess these elements are invested with new reference, and are utilized to generate a more challenging discussion.