Myer Windows, 1997: Melbourne International Film Festival

Jill Orr

1 - 31 Dec 1997

Melbourne International Film Festival, curated by Maudie Palmer, commissioned this work in 1997. The brief was to create a performance installation to operate for 17 days and nights. The performance installation was created for the four main display windows of the Myer department store, which was the first house of fashion created in the early days of Melbourne and which is still operating today. I focused on issues of fashion, the desire for the ideal body and the romance created by fashion which is never quite attainable. Hence the performances of Anorexia, the Ice Queen, Cracked Divas, Nocturna and the Panther, Doll, Cats, Mad Alice, etc. Each of the four windows was painted a different colour: a pastel pink and a dreamy blue for the more surreal and gentler emotions, a puke green and a reverberating orange for the more extreme actions like anorexia. I worked with slanted mirrors, Perspex slabs and Perspex coffins which were i nterchangeable and multi-functional sculptural elements, depending on the scenario. Coperformers were Lynne Santos and Gretel Taylor.