Dressing for testifying:
This edition derives from a series shown in Victoria Colmegna’s show Love Needs Care, Weiss Falk, Zurich 2022. (Love Needs Care was the title of a scientific study that analyzed the effects of amphetamines on rat brains in 1969.) The artist takes on an external subject matter (the girl sect that followed Manson) and paints the research-based images from the press. Her goal, as a fashion police, is to reveal how objects at the margins of the crime scenes become powerfully allusive and lend themselves to a narrative. Examining the visual cues in the photographs she highlights these signs; a smile, a dress, the palette from that time; (remember that Jean Piaget said that everything that is explained to a child takes away the pleasure of discovering it for himself). So, with some pleasure-seeking Colmegna asks herself: What (not who) are these smiling girls who walk across a courtroom like on a catwalk? No external sign betrays the horror of their bloody acts made almost like in a tantrum of a sadistic children’s game. In this new complexity of the process; the alchemy through which the M girls metamorphose into these characters are printed in fuzzy paper referencing the 90s stickers and culminates with the attempt to change those terrifying powers for simply charming ones; as if they were barbie dolls; wanting to play with them, sticking them on a school folder.
– Ruy Krygier
Photo: Cedric Mussano