Memory, discomfort with contemporary cultural perceptions, and the ideal of perfection are all frequent themes in the work of Rhonda Wightman. She uses fetishism as a means to investigate the obsession with perfection, beauty and acceptance. All three are ideals from which the fetish derives, perfection being the supposed key to success in today’s materialistic world. She sees a world obsessed with self imagery and the judgement of appearances, in which other people portray our inner being through what they see on the outside. Her work is the material of her investigation: “What is it that gives rise to the sensation thus creating the fetish?”

Wightman has produced a growing body of work of the confused woman, lost, disturbed, conflicted but searching for a different vision. Her work highlights connections between women’s objectification and their fragmentation in the visual arts and the media in western culture. The distortion lies not in the manipulation of reality, but in the uneasiness viewers may feel when forced to actually focus on the real.

Wightman has developed a variety of unique methods of working with the readymade, appropriating it into mixed media works that are carefully manipulated to heighten the senses. Her work explores how the human body is used, modified and fragmented in an attempt to influence the observer’s experience of an object or image. Through the use of materials she persuades the observer to feel attracted to the object, creating a sensation of either pleasure or disgust or perhaps both together. By changing the safe, reassuring, and gorgeous into the ugly, dangerous, and fascinating, she recognises how the lure of beauty manipulates and disfigures our perceptions.

 COPYRIGHT 2007