“Sex has been sold into consumerism,” says Sam Roddick. And she should know. The lifelong activist and artist is a former businesswoman, with a penchant for the sexy. She opened her ethical erotic lifestyle business Coco Der Mar in 2001, which became in part her platform for promoting issues around consent, sexual empowerment and feminism. She sold the company in 2011, turning her full attentions to her art – or, as she puts it, her visual philosophy.
“There is a massive gap between what we individually experience sexually and how the media represents it,” Roddick comments. Her artworks, then, promote the reconciliation of the two.
Inspired by architect/designer Carlo Mollino’s Polaroids (his “dark mystery”, as Roddick calls them), her forthcoming Hidden Within – which will be her first solo exhibition – will be hosted at London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery. Mollino’s infamous and mysterious Polaroids are remnants of a blatant male gaze, a fetishised construction of woman-as-object, featuring impersonally styled and scantily clad women, found stashed in a house designed, but not inhabited by, Mollino.
In her new show, Roddick explores this series of objectification through a sexually political recreation of Mollino’s controversial curio. She casts, positions, and photographs according to Mollino’s stylized and voyeuristic Polaroids. In doing so, she is addressing the sexual anxiety and sense of detachment that contemporary society subjects itself to, and challenges, in petulant mimicry, the ever-unchallenged male gaze.
Roddick cites sexual compassion as the conduit for becoming “more whole as a society” and to making “more loving decisions.” Her show opens March 19 at Michael Hoppen.
Image courtesy of Sam Roddick