The Birthday Party is a series of short stories linked by the thread of an imaginary birthday party. This is an anarchistic world which belongs only to children. There are no adults to give orders, and the children rule.
“ I photographed my youngest daughter and her friends in different outfits inspired by an imaginary party, using the washed out colour pallet and strange costumes to create a timeless quality. The children stare openly at the camera, but very little is revealed of themselves. In contradiction to ‘the happiest days of our lives’, I reveal a side of childhood that is not care-free or clichéd, projecting a range of emotions and definitions which are part of an imperfect world. I used the imaginary birthday party backdrop to address both our collective human experience of war and our need to retreat from it into fantasy. We are exposed to fear and anxiety in our daily lives, and this has become an underlying part of our society, omnipresent. The Birthday Party is punctuated with symbols of war and sees the characters responding on different levels, striking a chord within us to trigger our own concerns in relation to today’s paranoid society.”
Vee Speers, an Australian artist, has lived and worked in Paris since 1990. Speers studied fine art and photography at the QCA in Brisbane before working as a Stills Photographer at the ABC Television in Sydney in the 80’s. After moving to Paris in 1990 she began exhibiting her series ‘Bordello’ , followed by The Birthday Party and Immortal, engaging viewers with the dramatic tension of her portraits and her unique pallet of colour.
Speers has exhibited in London, Paris, Miami, NYC, Atlanta, China, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Tunisia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Sweden, Norway and the United States, and her work has been published on the covers of Zoom, Public Art, Photo International, Images Magazine, A Conceptual Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, The Sunday Times UK, Russian Photo and Video, Swedish Photo with features in Zoom, Art Investor, Germany, Shots UK, Photo District News NYC, Photographica Tokyo, EYEMAZING, American Black + White, Milk, Fotomagazine, Chinese Photography, Bloom, Arte Al Limite, etc.
Her book ‘Bordello’ with a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld is available world-wide, and her second book ‘The Birthday Party’ was released in October 2008 by Dewi Lewis, UK. Speers’ portraits have been acquired by the Elton John Collection, Michael Wilson, Hoffmans, Alan Siegel, Lawrence Schiller, DZ Bank, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, George Eastman House etc. and many private collections.
“The immediacy of Vee Speers’ imagery is overwhelming. Faces look directly at the viewer creating a quietly dramatic tension urging a reaction from the viewer. ‘The Birthday Party’ presents us with a façade of fantasy but with a pared down aesthetic that amplifies the visual intensity through its simplicity. These portraits of children confront us with reminders of our own childhood, whereby a homemade costume can transform you into a superhero, princess, cowboy or soldier, poised for adventures and hours of fun and excitement. The escapes that these worlds of play can provide disclose the underlying realities of the modern world, wrought with conflict and violence. Child psychologists use observation of play to decipher underlying traumas and issues that a child may be experiencing. Looking at these photographs, Speers strikes a chord within us to trigger our own concerns in relation to today’s paranoid society. The emotive responses to her work divulge more about the viewer than the viewed.”
Laura Noble, EyeMazing
The Birthday Party
From 4 September – 20 October 2012
The Little Black Gallery
13A Park Walk, London SW10 0AJ
England
Tel: 020-7349 9332.
Monday-Friday 11am-1pm & 2-6pm, Saturday 11am-4pm
