A rose is a rose is a rose seeks to playfully acknowledge the overt impropriety of a toilet-as-gallery and the latent impropriety of the toilet in general. The exhibition includes several stretched canvas-style works on flyscreen and an in-toilet text work.
The exhibition takes cues from an early 90s British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, parodying its floral patterns, pastel palette and fixation on decorum. This comical series centres on Hyacinth Bucket, who comes from a working-class family but now lives a middle-class life and anxiously performs as an upper-class subject. This performance involves insisting her name is pronounced as Hyacinth ‘Bouquet’, constantly policing the behaviour of her husband and family and going to great lengths to demonstrate her sophisticated taste.
In the series, Hyacinth is obsessed with cleanliness, and cleanliness is regularly made synonymous with social and moral superiority. Superiority associated with cleanliness could also speak to the desire to deny the messier aspects of bodily experience. The toilet is a pesky reminder of the cyclical nature of the body and ultimately, its impermanence. This association could be the cause of the ‘ick’ brought about by anything that was part of the body but has become separate from it, such as loose hairs caught in the drain.
The exhibition title, A rose is a rose is a rose is a famous quotation from Gertrude Stein. While it is said to mean that ‘things are what they are’, Stein’s repeated use and variation of this phrase suggests things are what they are in a given context. This exhibition embraces the toilet as a context to consider the anxious desire for separation between the proper and improper.
Katie Ryan is a visual artist who works through a combination of theoretical research and intuitive experimentation with materials. Born in Ireland, she has been living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, since 2013. Her work is concerned with modes of understanding, looking in particular at the connection between language-based cognition and embodiment. Working sculpturally, she considers the body as a site from which to extrapolate ideas relating to individualism, value and power.
