Ewing & George Paton Galleries,
Lynn Hershman:
The American feminist artist Lynn Hershman produced site-specific installation works that in their directness and “lack of ambiguity”1 created a dissonance within the audience that upsets the most basic of our cultural and domestic assumptions. In its ongoing series of extended exhibitions that included video, which go back as far as 1974, the Ewing & George Paton Galleries (at the Melbourne University Students Union) brought Hershman to Australia to create Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia.
As well as the Dream Homes tour there were two other parts to the exhibition, one at the Ewing & George Paton Galleries and the other at Monash University Exhibition Gallery. At these Hershman showed documentation of many of her similar projects through which she breaks open the myths of (sub)urban culture. These included video from the Dante Hotel project (1973), photographs from and video about the Bonwit Teller department store windows project (1975-76), and photographs and documents from the Roberta project (1975).
A survey in documentation of past works by Hershman.
Presented at the Ewing & George Paton Galleries, and the Monash University Gallery. 6-23 September, 1977
Documentation in various media of Dante Hotel (1973), Forming a Sculptured Drama in Manhattan (1974), Forming Familiar Environments (1975), Roberta (1975), Lady Luck (1975), Rehearsals ((1977)
Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia.
Ewing & George Paton Galleries, 16-18 September, 1977.
Hershman uses existing (sub)urban environments almost as sociology, to expose what she has described as “reality discrepancies” For this work she arranged for a shuttle bus tour of three display homes at a housing estate then under development along the Burwood Highway in suburban Melbourne. The voyeurism of the tours was intended to air “the problems of the 'Suburban Sprawl' and the aspirations and realities of the 'Dream Home' [as projected by the developers of ] Housing Estates and Project home[s]”
1Sandy Ballatore, “Observations” in Grazia Gunn, Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers (curators), Lynn Hershman, Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia, Melbourne: Ewing & George Paton Galleries and Monash University Gallery (1977), 6.
