The After School Club Moira’s subjects are taken out of school themed nightclubs and placed, still wearing their ‘fancy dress’, in a new but not totally irrelevant space. This body of work has grown out of preliminary photo-sketches taken at such themed clubs, these documentary photographs show young women, under the influence of alcohol, flaunting themselves in revealing uniforms. The girls gyrate provocatively; emulating lap dancers with porn star facial expressions. Is this the influence of media imagery, informing the sexual identity of women or their own sexual instinct? Furthermore their routines appear to be aimed squarely at the opposite sex. Lovell’s club shots invite the spectator to question the positioning of feminism within today’s society. The nightclub space offers freedom from social restraint. It’s an environment that falls between the social spheres of public and private, allowing unrestricted sensual and hedonistic display. This candour combined with the suggestive schoolgirl outfits proffered a masquerade that captivated the artist. The school uniform, as worn in the clubs, offers up a sexualised and infantilised display of unthreatening female sexuality to the male gaze. Within the education system it aims to provide a homogeneous identity to prevent competition between pupils. Moira Lovell mixes the two up by returning the clubbers to their secondary school gates whilst still in their revellers garb. ‘Raunch culture’ is spliced with the playground as Lovell’s photographs abruptly report on how little seems to remain of the schoolyard’s openness and curiosity. Yet the suggestion is also that school’s as ‘disciplinary’ institutions have in some way, as part of today’s society, created obedient adherents to the male gaze. Lovell doesn’t direct her models; she lets them perform, as they want in front of the camera. There is a certain uniformity of pose, which is balanced by the uniformity of composition; frontal and centrally composed, taken slightly below eye level. The shoots take place during daylight, outside empty out-of-hours schools. This creates an uneasy setting for the models. Without any indication of the time, one could easily presume that it’s ‘the morning after the evening before’ and the girls are shamefully on their way home after an evening out. The new situation, the hour, the institution, the artist’s camera, all intentionally interrogates the strength of the girls’ nightclub performances. The young women have an ambivalent relationship with their new scenario. Outside of their theatre (and positioned within the photographer’s) they struggle to get fully into their role. Even the camera, an instrument of attraction and revelation within the club, can’t lure them into their nightclub persona. The resulting photographs are oddly comic, as the girls appear self-consciousness but there is a more powerful feeling of pathos, nostalgia, and the acid tinge of naivety corrupted and exploited.
Resume
Resume Moira Lovell was born South Yorkshire was born in South Yorkshire, England, 1977. She studied for a BA (hons) in Photography at the Kent Institute of Art and Design between 1996 -1999. Moira gained an MA in Photography from the London College of Communication in 2006. She works as a professional artist and is a tutor for the Open College of the Arts. Moira’s current body of work draws attention to the third wave of feminism or as it’s better know ‘Raunch Culture’, questioning the positioning of the movement within today’s society. She has exhibited the work in London and recently given talks about in UK and Europe. Moira will start to develop this project into a new body of work this September when she starts a residency at a Pupil Referral Unit in London. She will work one day a week for one year with children who are bored, unmotivated, and pessimistic about their future. By working with the students she hopes to help raise pupils’ self-esteem and widen their horizons.
