Set Dressing: Gary Cocker, Christine Hellyar, Cao Xun

In 1985, Christine Hellyar produced her first set of Apron sculptures, cotton garments on which were sewn latex casts of food—a plucked chicken, kumara, flounder, squid, tripe. The artist conceived of these works as objects to be worn. To this end, she commissioned Gary Cocker, then a student at Elam School of Fine Arts, to capture the aprons in use. Cocker’s images feature his friends and then-lover posing in a range of locations from the beach to the bush. Read together, they seem to operate between documentation, performance and absurd fashion editorial, which trouble the garment’s association with women and the realm of domestic labour. These photographs transpose a queer sense of glamour onto Hellyar’s works, making all the more explicit the visual punning and erotic associations of Hellyar’s materials and their placement.

In Set Dressing, Cocker’s photographs of Hellyar’s sculptures appear in conversation with recent works by Tamaki Makaurau Auckland-based photographer Cao Xun.

Cao trades in a visual language which employs gloss and glamour to consider the body’s relationship to the social and material world around it. Though appearing playful and pulsing with desire, Cao says his works circulate around ‘embarrassment.’ The human form—here captured partially concealed or turning away from the camera’s gaze—acts as a site of both shame and relief, pleasure and repulsion, self-effacement and revelation.