Femme Fatale: The female criminal

“As a double exception, the criminal woman is a true monster. Criminals are an exception in people and women are an exception among criminals.” I was really drawn to this quote at the beginning of the exhibition, probably because the statement illustrates attitudes of a time gone by so well and also cleverly introduces the provocative curatorial direction of the Femme Fatale exhibition.

This show takes a close look at women and crime in Australia from the convict era through the booming years of the infamous inner city Razor gangs of 1920s Sydney. It is a relatively small exhibition space but is absolutely crammed with fascinating historical artefacts and other objects, multimedia and pop-culture memorabilia. The content comes together to paint a vivid picture of the female as the screen siren, the comic vixen and the temptress and seductress of detective stories as well as the revengeful wife, murderous lover and underprivileged opportunist. The exhibition cleverly exemplifies how beliefs about wicked women are cross-cultural and have evolved from archetypal stories of Eve, Medusa and Witches, transcending myth over time, to be embedded in our popular consciousness today.

Don’t let the content of psychopathic murderers, incarcerated criminals, violent offenders, prostitution, sly grogging and stark criminal records with photographic evidence deter you from seeing this exhibition. It is a classy and sassy romp through culture and Sydney’s dark past, injected with just as much humour as there is chill-factor!


7 March, 2009 - 18 April 2010
Weekends 10-5 (booked school groups during the week only)
Closed Good Friday and Christmas day
Adult $8, child/concession $4, members free

Justice & Police Museum
Corner Albert and Phillip Streets
Circular Quay NSW 2001
http://www.hht.net.au/museums/justice_and_police_museum

Brett Whiteley Studio – Iconic Whiteley

Another hidden treasure of inner Sydney, the Brett Whiteley studio is a source for endless inspiration. If you have been living under a rock the past century and do not know who Brett Whiteley is to the Australian art scene, then this exhibition is for you. It is a survey of the many decades of Whiteley’s career from his lesser known work of his late teens and early twenties including landscape abstraction, Christie, and Zoo series, through to his popular Lavender Bay, Paris and Bird series.

The exhibition includes 33 paintings in the downstairs gallery including the self-portrait masterpieces that won him the Archibald Prize on more than one occasion and over half a dozen mixed media assemblages creating a smaller but dynamic and also significant survey of Whitley sculpture.

One of my favourite pieces would have to be the large canvas after French inspiration, titled Fifteen great dog pisses of Paris, 1989, hanging in the upstairs studio lounge. It is a large perspective view of the banks of the Seine with ominous patches intermittently staining the walls, distracting from the majestic, painterly view and upsetting the overall romantic oeuvre that has been recreated. To me this picture is true Whiteley slapping the viewer in the face with his warped and overtly subversive take on the world.

While, you couldn’t ever call Whiteley’s paintings ”pretty” , there is a world of beauty and seduction in his fluid lines, gestural brushwork and bright hued compositions, as there is humour. The unfinished six panel board upstairs in the studio is as fresh, interesting and whimsical today as the day it was left unfinished due to his tragic death in 1992. The studio itself is somewhat of a shrine to the artist with every accoutrement left in situ; the library of books, paints, bed, home furnishings, wall quotes, newspaper clippings and graffiti; giving a spooky sense the artist is still at work. Overall the environment of the studio is crammed with the back story of whitely. It’s worth picking up the old black telephone and listening in on the Andrew Olley interview, where you get a tangible sense of who the artist was and what made him tick. There is a candid discussion about Brett’s battle with drug addiction which perhaps plays a vital part in both the artist’s accomplishments and demise.

There is no denying Brett whitely has left a massive mark on Australian art, a legacy that continues to foster other artists’ talents through the Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship today.

The smaller changing upstairs exhibit of the annual prize this year displays the winner, Nicole Kelly. Her painterly freedom and lavish paint application creates modern and abstract landscapes “without baggage and clutter for the past” (as Whiteley himself would put it). For Whiteley, Abstraction was “Liberating... There is a freedom of mass, line and tone. A sensuality with things slightly out of focus”, and for Nicole Kelly this ethos is also strong.

I look forward to the next changing exhibit at the Whiteley Studio so I can return and discover some more hidden gems I missed this time round.



Brett Whiteley Studio
2 Raper St
Surry Hills NSW 2010
(02) 9225 1740
Free admission
10am-4pm Saturday & Sunday
Thursday & Friday booked school groups
12 September – April 2010
http://brettwhiteley.org/