Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker)(1997, Re-edited and re-authored 2002 for Tate Modern).

This work is a video, single screen projection.

It ws part of ‘From Tarzan to Rambo’, a major group exhibition at Tate Modern (one year duration) curated by Emma Dexter (Senior Curator, TM) and artist Sonia Boyce, Ambitious, it was the first exhibition launched at Tate Modern specifically addressing race, gender and sexuality within art. Its premise was to examine works by established and emergent artists spanning a twenty-year period from the 1980’s. Exhibiting artists included: Zoe Leonard (‘Documenta XI, XII’; Paula Cooper, NY); Sonia Boyce (Hayward Art Gallery; Tate Britain; Vancouver Art Gallery); Sutapa Biswas (‘VI Havana Biennial’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario).

Thematically, the exhibition looked at how key artists in the UK and US have radically challenged perceptions of subjectivity in relation to gender, race and sexuality, and how this has shifted the dominant cultural map. This exhibition’s themes were subsequently explored in publication: ‘Shades of Black Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain’, edited: David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce (2005, ISBN 0822334208).

Within the exhibition, whilst most works revisted portrayals of the black subject (female/male) within different historical narratives, my work, ‘Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker)’, (video-, projection), reflected on ‘the gaze’ and the relationship between the subject (here a white, middle-aged, portly man), the director (myself – non-white, woman) and the viewer. Based on Edward Hopper’s painting ‘Woman in the Sun’, c1953, the male subject within my video-work stands naked in front of a bay window, exposed at a particularly vulnerable time in one’s life.

• http://www.pica.org/festival_detail_new....
• http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17204.htm