Anxious Objects

Anxious Objects
1992
self-titled
found objects, metallic and enamel paint, adhesive lettering on MDF
300 x 350 x 80mms to 500 x 500 x 80mms


'... in works which resemble René Magritte's peinture-poésié, Susan Fereday's Remember Me, Anxious Object, and Just the Facts revisit the format of Magritte's Key of Dreams 1930. In her object assemblages she combines a studied interest in Surrealist art history with linguistic and semiotic pictogramming and a deliberate sense of wickedness. Remember Me 1992 refers not only to Man Ray's What We All Lack 1927 but particularly to Magritte's The Wind and the Song (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) 1928/9 and the circular pun is written in both painted and labelled object. Fereday sees Magritte's double entendre and raises the ante by suggesting a triple bypass return to the object... remember me (pipe), remember me (Magritte) and, remember me (reinstate my member) - or, if you like - this is a pipe painted by Magritte to suggest a phallic symbol. How could we forget?'

Juliana Engberg, exhibition catalogue The Aberrant Object: Women Dada and Surrealism, 1993


 
 
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