Having just returned from a week in Marakech, where gender inequality is very much in your face, now feels like a good time to re-visit Penis Emporium, a piece I showed here in Cambridge, last summer in Changing Rooms, with fellow Anglia Ruskin University students and alumni, in conjunction with Changing Spaces. A light-hearted attempt on my part to redress the balance by objectifying the penis, in preference to the female form, Penis Emporium, an abundance of phallus inspired objet, was housed in one of the changing rooms in what was once the H and M store in the Grafton Center, The Emporium was envisaged as a small shop where visitors could browse and handle such goods as Two Headed Trouser Snake, Penis Man, Eunuch Boy, My Little Penis, Baby Bunting and penis cut-outs (very pretty and not as painful as they sound). At the request of the Grafton Center management, to spare the blushes of unsuspecting shoppers and their offspring, a curtain with a spy hole was secured in the doorway, thus transforming said shop into a peep show.
While the Penises in the Emporium were curtained from view, elsewhere in the Grafton Centre, primary and secondary sexual organs were available in sweet form on the shelves of a well known toy shop, and World Cup teeshirts (see above) were displayed in shop fronts and promoted as ideal for purchase by children, as Father's Day gifts.
One man's 'inappropriate' is another woman's fuck off.
One man's 'inappropriate' is another woman's fuck off.
It is my plan to develop this work further and present it as part of a penis themed group show and day conference on the subject of objectification ( to raise the level of public debate! See link below)
http://cambridge.tab.co.uk/2014/06/08/put-your-penises-away/
So if you've got any penis related work, do get in touch.
http://cambridge.tab.co.uk/2014/06/08/put-your-penises-away/
So if you've got any penis related work, do get in touch.