flowah powah (2023)
Alice Lang: Flowah Powah borrows from a vibrant counterculture aesthetic that rose out of LA in the 1960s, while playing on a uniquely Australian vernacular, through humorous and sometimes absurd painting, text and sculpture. The LA-based Australian artist and QUT alumni challenges the audience to consider biases and assumptions surrounding heteronormativity, gender roles and body politics in her first major institutional show.
Lang’s use of materials traditionally associated with craft, such as puffy paint and marbled paper, boldly addresses the historical devaluation of feminised labour and materials. This reclamation is echoed in the provocative language repeated throughout the exhibition, the jarring scale and decontextualisation competing with psychedelia for the viewer’s attention. The politically charged work explores how capitalism and the patriarchy combine to determine that a woman’s “value” resides in their body by seeking to control female bodily autonomy through objectification and the restriction of reproductive rights.
In Flowah Powah, Lang taps into the current political and cultural climate to deliver a high impact visual journey full of kitsch, vulgarism and the absurd that ignites a discussion around how existing patriarchal power structures disseminate and manifest within individual bodies and mass culture.
