The ambitious and rather lovely photographic exhibition Victoriana: Pleasure Garden by Gerard O’Connor and Marc Wasiak, has been relocated from its first home among the dusk-lit trees of Fitzroy Gardens, for a second season – until Friday, December 18 – to the National Trust of Australia (Victoria)’s Tasma Terrace, 6 Parliament Place, East Melbourne. (Article first published, The Age.)
Tight-laced maidens indulge in a spot of gentle archery, dark faeries crouch in the shadowy undergrowth, a lofty “fox” models a splendid tailored ensemble, ideal for the modern Victorian gentleman. The culmination of a year-long project by Melbourne fashion photographer Gerard O’Connor and stylist Marc Wasiak, is an exhibition of these and more exotic characters rendered in arrestingly large format, digitally manipulated photographs (some almost two metres high).
“Victoriana was a love project,” says O’Connor. “It involved a lot of passionate people making an idea come to life.” About 100 people, in fact, including wardrobe assistants, prop and set builders, hair and make-up artists, special effects artists, film crew, dressers and general gofers, volunteered to create or play characters in the pair’s fantastic vision of a grand Victorian spectacle, shot over three days at the National Trust’s Ripponlea Mansion.
“We’ve always gravitated to the Victorian era and its crazy extremes,” says Wasiak. “It was a tight-laced, conservative time, but it had a real undercurrent of perversity. Science and spirituality co-existed: people believed in the occult and seances and nymphs and fairies, yet someone was also discovering that we all have different blood types.”
Late last year, Wasiak and O’Connor began conjuring characters and vignette storylines to slot into their imaginary garden party. “There’s a lot going on when you get a group of people together,” Wasiak says. “A lot the viewer might not usually see; a couple might be breaking up, or someone could be going through someone else’s handbag …”
The potential for intrigue was limitless and the pair let their imaginations rip. In the Victoriana Pleasure Garden tableaux, a butler balks as a dowager and faun doze in the sun, foxes and peacocks strut about, evil creatures with slit eyes and snouts slither through the undergrowth, a giant tortoise shuffles around an opulent buffet.
After a three day shoot at the height of last summer, followed by months of post-production wizardry, the result is a hyper-real snapshot of life on a lovely spring day, 150 years ago.
O’Connor says the link between 19th century fashion, and fashion now, is whimsically obvious. “For one thing, people are still as bawdy, silly, sexy, naughty, whatever, as they ever were, and spring’s still the biggest season in fashion,” he says. “The garden party was where people showed off their new clothes.”
O’Connor and Wasiak are renowned for their extravagant, digitally enhanced photographic tableaux. They take time out from their commercial work to collaborate on spectacular scenes of battle, bordellos, a 1950s beach and recently, a Victorian funeral made all the more dramatic when they blasted the cast of widows and mourners with water from a fake rain machine. “That worked well,” says a wry Wasiak.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
