Artist Statement
Alex Brew’s photography has been shown at universities, squats and artist-led galleries including RampART, Kings College London, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club and ArtsBar, and published in the academic journals Feminist Media Studies and International Feminist Journal of Politics and magazines including Sleek XX/XY.
Her most recent show was at Middlesex University where a video was displayed using five projectors. The 2011 work: ‘Being a sex object: Not for the faint-hearted’ is one of a series of attempts by Alex Brew to explore and intervene in gendered power relations and dynamics. It aims to recreate the societal influences and expectations governing and limiting many of our interactions with the opposite sex.
Other work includes a series of hand-printed, black and white images, from the project ‘Asking For It’ in which she attempts and fails to objectify men. The project becomes more of an exploration of the skewed power dynamics between men and women that make objectifying men so difficult. This project incorporates text, sound and images documenting her progress from acquaintances to strangers. She approaches men in public places outside offices, pubs, cafes and gentlemen’s venues often in London’s square mile and then negotiates with them into a more private space – an alleyway, a car park, or back at their place or hers. Once there she asks them to remove items of clothes.
She gives talks about her work, including at the Feminist Library in London as part of an evening of discussion around the eroticisation of men with Filament Magazine – transcript on RAG Dublin and at academic conferences including Aberdeen’s ‘Ending Feminist Futures?’ and the Cardiff/IoE/Kings seminar series ‘Pornified? The sexualisation of culture.’ In 2010 she put together an exhibition looking at masculinity called ‘me maskuline’ which included work by Del LaGrace Volcano, Alexis Hunter, Grace Lau and Oreet Ashery and was shown at Arts in Camberwell and at Kings College London. Her ‘zine ‘At Sea With Sexists’ is stocked by radical bookshops and archived by the British Library. She has also subverted and reprinted a series of ‘saucy postcards’ which first appeared in Trespass Magazine.
Currently in progress is a project called ‘femmetakingliberties’ which uses strategies from the Pick-Up Artist community (normally exclusively male and heterosexual) to pick up men. In this project (amongst other things) she sat in a café for a week and used lines and tactics from the book ‘The Game’ – on men. In addition she asked some men to take her picture for her, using her camera. There was a queering of her interactions with men as she performs her pick-ups using a more-butch-than-usual (but still passing as female) persona; taking on the usually-reserved-for-the-male role.
