Dominic Reidy’s modest sculpture pulls together elements from a number of sources to construct a morphing image of masculinity. Each originally had some agency in the formulation and projection of an ‘ideal’ male form, drawing on such things as body image, sex appeal, strength and power, amid the influential arenas of religious, popular culture/ media and peer socialisation processes. At the base of the sculpture are various ‘men’s magazines’, with titles like IronMan and Muscle & Fitness. One uses for its front cover the Charles Atlas cliché of the muscle bound hero strutting on a beach, literally draped by (at least) three equally tough and toned babes. Without irony, our hairless, bottle- blonded beefcake poses so as to ripple and flex all the appropriate anatomical delights.
While these magazines also include a range of advertisements and articles from ‘beating cancer’, to ‘power packed abs’, and tips for ‘sexual fatigue’ or ‘How to get better’, it is the process of gender representation they embody — of aestheticisation and objectification the artist wishes to research.He’s scanned and re-photographed images from within these publications to produce a looped dvd, screened by a bit of old school televisual technology (the ‘box’), and framed the entire equation within the confines of a milk crate, a readymade plinth. Its DIY handyman look and feel belies a sophisticated and sensitive rendering of emotive and psychological states, where the frenetic wavering outlines of the prone figure, almost given repose as a corpse in a screenformat coffin, shimmers and pulses, linked to the heavens by a power umbilical cord and the dulcet tones of Psalm 23 (The Lord is My Shepherd).
Inner, corporeal terrains suggestive of anxiety and mood shifts are also given life, whilst the bodily form he conjures resembles the twitching flesh and gristle of electrified meat. It’s hardly a physique that fits the stereotype offered by mainstream media, and yet it catches beautifully a sense of vulnerability and isolation largely ignored by more widely promulgated ideals of manhood. Dominic Reidy graduates with a Bachelor of Fine Art with Majors in Sculpture, Art Theory and Drawing, and has exhibited regularly in QCA projects. SP Wright