IMAGINATION TAKES FLIGHT - Luxury Splash of Art

It’s a unique form of travel. One from a land of innocence and carefree joys to a subterranean haunt of bafflement and foreboding. Such an exploration demands an insightful Eye, an acute sensitivity, for a Birthday Party (2007) can be like an Expressionist painting–a canvas revealing waves of doubt together with youthful flights of imagination. No ordinary celebration, it is a Sturm und Drang parade of unrest– glum-faced young girls appear in fishnet stockings, armed with weaponry and carrying dead animals. Young boys wearing gas masks are clearly ready to grapple with an unknown future. These 8-year-old boys, bare-chested, and hoping to project an air of defiance, are equally reflective of Dystopia. They have been betrayed, guests at a party with little mirth and assurance that all will be well. Here there’s only the recognition these celebrants are at Childhood’s End. That they’re poised on a perilous precipice, about to face a disfigured world morphing towards the bleak and bizarre.

Youthful hope would later be palpable, resilient and powerful. Like a Phoenix, youngsters would fly, seize their moments in time and space, display the virtues that make them inviolable. How would they discover trust and magic– navigate spectres in a world turned upside down, rife with dead rats and troubling grayness? Impeccably surreal, erudite, and ever provocative, Paris-based photographer Vee Speers habitually probes, jabs and subverts with her incisive, unfettered questioning. Driven to pierce perfection–the layered makeup, wigs, and 1930s white frocks worn by her rat and mask-carrying children– Speers whips us into a realm of contrasts, contradictions, and conflicts–a shifting, kaleidoscopic reality of grotesqueries edged with lyricism and beauty.

Confessing the disquiet in their melancholic expressions is in part “autobiographical,” Speers emphasizes, “… growing up in Australia…I dodged bullets like all youngsters do. I wanted to capture the last days of childhood in my photos…That balloons are transitory, joy, but soon gone.”A sombre portrayal? Of course. We all want a birthday party to be Alice in a charmed fantasyland. Not a hide-n-seek game with existential doubts, careening through a disquieting rabbit hole. But Speers, the photographic observer, prizes “authenticity.” She hopes to peel away artifice, and capture an evolutionary unfolding, to reveal the “soul” of her subjects. To “fuse” with them, to reward us with “out of body” experiences.Connecting with people, pursuing their innermost depths, demands a bold willingness to explore the “dark” and provocative–to enter the Bordello. To cast aside all inhibitions, and to immerse herself in “The Shanghai’s” erotica. Plunging into this masked and taboo world of Paris’ maison closes, Speers sheds the claustrophobic restrictions of her Anglican Church background. Paying homage to Man Ray and Brassai, she embraces prostitution with suggestive, shadowy noir titillation, and tenderly sculpts Desire–its lightness and mystery. “I feel I’m a messenger, providing a nostalgic, sumptuous look at women serving men,” explains Speers, describing the reverence she feels for these women “obsessed” with beauty “New to Paris, I was just warming up (with Bordello), being playful, trying to be discreet, always looking for the authentic…happy to create a bit of poetry, mystery.

They are moments. They come when me and the subject or model fuse, peak (together). Connecting with that moment is magic.”Enchanted by Bodello’s rekindling of “secret” 1930s’ glamour, fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld wrote the forward to Speers’ monograph heralding these maisons closes. Such praise further encouraged her to keep stripping away layers, to explore the “unhinged,” and to picture the “psychology of people.” Admitting this pursuit has her “jumping all over the place,” Speers still returns to “building stories,” arraying countless symbols (masks, swords, etc.) and costumes to evoke life’s many faces–and fascinations. That life is a constant maelstrom, veering between Love and Loss, turmoil, tears, and of course, transformation. A young boy turns into a heroic, helmeted Toy Soldier, awaiting his call to duty, while in the series Bulletproof the customary playfulness of adolescents is hauntingly questioned. Speers becomes the Mad Max chronicler of societal breakdown, exiling youths from their breezy innocence, and asking them to be brave–to use their survival instincts to become gladiators in the most virtuous sense of the word.

Knives, a futuristic machine gun, chains, coupled with masked combatants foretell a strange new world–a return to medieval primitivism and absurdium. But Speers still has an eye for beauty here, a faith in the strength and determination of her warriors. She has survived ordeals, and firmly believes in our ability to triumph over adversity. That rings clear in her sequined-garbed toreador, and scythe-carrying “brute.” They are configured with delicacy, a certain poignancy, to elicit our faith they will flourish–to prevail in a world gone mad. A mysterious adolescent encircled by charmed ravens epitomizes young, mythic beauty. She is similarly evocative of resilience–taming wild forces to prepare for a flight into the unknown. Speers’ oeuvre is continually interpreting, taking daring leaps, plunging deep into the unpredictable–and discovering an indefatigable spirit to surmount the bedeviling–and devastating.

Her Bordello women and gladiators are messengers trumpeting survival–and so is she. In the new Phoenix series the flames and ashes disappear–emerging is the emboldening force of liberation. There’s a kinetic, galvanizing energy here, women renewed. They are on the threshold of new beginnings– elegantly revealing their bodies, and sensing their hard-won independence–their mystique. One aspect of Speers’ work is about “dodging bullets,” but in this Phoenix tapestry of “ascending,” she pictures “women who have suffered, found little respect, and are now achieving. Phoenix (20 photos) is my homage to the Anonymous Woman, so many women have had to remain anonymous…their struggles. “It’s happening today. Women artists aren’t treated equally, their representation in museums is less. I am still motivated…To keep getting my work out there.”Overcoming the “bullets” in her life, Speers seems to have found an inspirational Muse. It’s a woman, a provocative figure shielding her face with shimmering strands of coral. Why cloak her in mystery? Discover her, and all will be answered.