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- Ciarán Power
Ciarán
Power
Scopophilia
“Woman is secondary and so supplementary and so an act: Her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty”.
Ciarán Power is focused on addressing sexuality as a dominant social performance. Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ states that womanliness is a cover-up to conform with social constructions of femininity; a masquerade whereby the woman as a category does not exist. This would suggest that sexuality is a central part of social performance. The performance reveals a structure; it is a response to a male fantasy. The artworks open a discourse and provide a reference point for speculation surrounding issues that are fundamental to the nature of contemporary social life.
The series titled ‘Scopophilia’ becomes a substitute for provoking and satisfying the voyeuristic and fetishistic needs of the traditionally masculine viewer. In their creation, the hyper-mediated artworks must pass through Power—a male artist—in order to be realised. A sexually-charged relation between the viewer and the frame is thus constructed. Therefore, both the male fiction of (mis)representation and the social fiction of sexuality are represented. One’s own perception is joined to the orchestration of the male gaze and is forced to be its active bearer. The subject of the artwork is rendered as passive object. This results in a disturbing and complex body of work of power, pleasure, agency and fantasy in the broad world of contemporary popular culture.
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