For immediate release
Kathy Temin - Iconic Moments
17 March 3 April 2004 Sue Crockford Gallery 2 Queen St Auckland
Australian artist Kathy Temin's work has over a 14 year period engaged with ideas about identity, memory, and
displacement through references to suburban and cultural icons in popular culture. She is particularly interested in
situations where private and collective memory coincide. Temin work uses a broad range of media taking the form of
objects, pictures, wall drawings, installations and photographs. Her early work used materials and references to
childhood and adolescence in the form of synthetic fur sculptural objects and with felt pictures relating to the game
"fuzzy felt". She has made works portraying private activities and displayed them in public spaces. For example, during
her residency at PS1 in New York she made a series of photographs titled ŒAuditions for a pair of koalas¹ where she
asked American actors to impersonate a pair of koalas mating. Most people that came to the audition had not seen a koala
in the flesh and brought their own projection and fantasy of how a koala behaves to the project. These photographs will
be included in Public/Private, The 2nd Auckland Triennial 2004, Auckland Art Gallery 20 Mar - 30 May 2004
Adolescence, and the idealization of it, is a recurring theme. This concept features in the project My Kylie Collection,
installed last year as part of the exhibition Extended Play at the Govett-Brewster Art gallery, New Plymouth, where
Temin made an installation titled My Kylie Collection centered around a teenage girl¹s bedroom containing real collected
material. The installation was a combination of works made around the fantasy of being a fan that included felt
pictures, mirrored perspex objects, and a series of glass pictures titled Frozen Moments (as part of My Kylie
Collection). These works engage with the subject of fandom, where Kylie Minogue has been used as the subject to engage
with ideas of celebrity, fandom and identity. Most recently Temin presented a one night event at the Institute of
Contemporary art (ICA) in London where 20 performers were auditioned live singing either an impersonation or an
interpretation of any Kylie Minogue song to four judges from the art world and an audience. She is currently working on
a dvd documenting the event.
For the Sue Crockford Gallery exhibition Iconic Moments, Temin has continued to combine images of women from the media,
images which are usually throw away and transitory. These works are fused glass pictures that reference both classical
relief and commemorative ideals. The fetishized material of fused glass has a seductive and glossy surface that was
originally used by Temin to reference the ideals associated with fandom. She used the bubblegum colours of pink, cream
and brown where imitation of chocolate and ice cream allude to addiction, fantasy, narscissim, projection, and
consumption. With the new series, Iconic Moments, the images of women are translated into a palette of black, grey, and
white glass. The images are art historical such as Jemima Stehli's image of herself as an Allan Jones chair sculpture,
as well as images taken from the mass media. Temin combines interpretations of images of well known icons like Kate
Moss, Kylie Minogue, and the Queen, and pinup girls from the past. Also included in the exhibition are Temin¹s
reinterpretation of Robert Mapplethorpe¹s celebrated portrait of Louise Bourgeois and a portrait image of Eva Hesse.
Kathy Temin acknowledges her identification with other artists and their work and aims to create different readings of
these images.