DRINK BLEACH

DRINK BLEACH is a suite of new works comprising three embedded sculptures, six framed pictures, five wall-mounted steel sculptures and a single large wall print. The installation traces the symptoms of moral fantasies within masculinity, examining what fulfills narratives of fact versus fantasy and how each affects masculinity's self-interpretation. The work draws from a 1983 television episode featuring writers John Berger and Susan Sontag discussing the relationship between storyteller and listener, and the points at which their perspectives of fact and fantasy intersect. Berger argues that storytellers often begin with an intention to be factual but inevitably "begin to invent," shifting accounts from factual toward imaginative. Sontag emphasizes the listener's responsibility to make interpretive choices about what is fact or fantasy. Little maps this oscillation onto contemporary constructions of masculinity, particularly as mediated through the internet. In pursuing authenticity, masculinity has entered a feedback loop of self-mythologising where the continual retelling and embellishment of its own narrative renders fact and fantasy almost indistinguishable. The stories men tell about themselves intertwine with those absorbed from culture into a single mythic fabric: at once grounded in reality and deeply fantastical.