“Focal Point Gallery is delighted to host ‘Woman with Salad’, a performance by Emily Perry. Perry’s interest in the repetitive actions of women’s labour and the endless loop format of the GIF intersect with a comparison between contemporary stock imagery and Johannes Vermeer’s 17th century paintings of domestic women forever captured in precarious mundanity.”
‘Woman with Salad’ features seven local women, both actors and non-actors, performing commercial stock image actions such as laughing and gesturing with salad on fork, peeling apples and looking bored, sighing or sitting in yoga positions making slow gestures with a halved avocado. These women are animating patriarchal, sexist, reductive images of themselves to be consumed by capitalism. Their ridiculous performance, dumb, relentless enthusiasm and sarcastic, robotic delivery mocks and subverts agency. At first a one-liner, the performance becomes a grotesque cycle in which we are all implicit.
With thanks to brilliant performers: Roberta Bernardelli, Corinna Brown, Emelia Hayman, Ruth Jones, Emily Kenneally, Verity Sharpe and Azaelia Slade.