According to the exhibition essay for Mia Sandhu's Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You at Patel|Brown:
It's not just the earthly colour palette that triggers olfactory hallucinations of musty shag-carpets, smokey floral upholstery, and dusty rattan furniture. All elements in Sandhu's drawings come together to produce a synaesthetic reaction — you can smell, hear, taste, and feel her staged environments. And you do so in the position of voyeur.
However, the aesthetics of the exhibition as a whole have far less to do with pornography in the 1970s – particularly in its North American form (it looks more British/Scandinavian) – than with the aesthetics of sitcoms and game shows. There is far more The Price is Right than Penthouse on display.
While the colour scheme does recall such a period, it’s notable less for its “synesthetic” effects alluded to in the accompanying text – and leaving the questionable if generic association between scent and memory aside - than for the exhibitionistic quality of is its absence. (Unlike the show at nearby Galerie Popup where there was a pungent literalness to the presence of rotting oranges and flowers). For the reference is the mediated and already mostly optical notion of the era, not the phenomenality of it. As a sensory experience, it’s more like looking at an old TV screen than entering the past.
Nostalgia and time capsuling really don’t come into this. Rather, it resembles a loosely cobbled-together “period” TV show made by Netflix where everything has been adjusted in post for a hazy, loosely evocative, but mostly inaccurate depiction of something quite foreign to those involved and likely to most of those viewing it.
This carries over to various anachronistic tendencies that provide its dominant cues. The simplified linearity of the bodies is more a feature of 1980s than 70s erotica, where it generally retained a more broken and squiggly quality when it wasn’t outright cartoonish. Although some of the attention to lingerie is comparable, these do not have the strength of Dennis Burton’s highly eccentric metaphysical lingerie work from the period she is referencing.
More than the vaporwave tendencies that seem to be present but weakening among younger artists, here there is something closer to a sort of half-baked orientalism, like a really cheap amber perfume repurposed as an air freshener rather than languid nostalgia or the hypnagogic.
This is in keeping with the basic tensions that run through the work between a theatricalized sensuality and its severe cauterization, a characteristic that is continually evidenced by the contrast between the flat, poreless bodies she presents and the textures of carpet and wood that frame them.
The theatrical setting suggests a vaguely erotic narrative. It’s never really articulated. The figures are primarily pregnant women, sometimes in pairs, or with a mysterious accomplice who may or may not be engaged in a sexual act with them. Their partners heads are covered by patterned sheets, the forms of their bodies hardly articulated.
The pregnant figures themselves have heads occluded by a sort of black fog, their eyes and mouths or teeth showing through with varying levels of clarity. Complicating this, the depiction of their heads mirrors that of their pubic hair, which is less illustrated than obscured, rather like the blurs or pixelation commonly applied to pubic hair in contemporary Japanese pornography. (Black dots were sometimes applied in North America but blurs have been rare).
Unlike with the faces, genitalia are not visible beneath. Indeed, the barring of any trace of genitalia is even stressed in one image in which a feather duster obscures the vagina that would be visible when the figure bends over.
The nipples of the figures occupy a kind of middle ground between the flat, impenetrable surface and the blurring of the faces or erasure of the genitals.
Sandhu's protagonists appear to be on the cusp of something: they seem unshakeable, poised, and undoubtedly sexy, but perhaps are still fighting to be fully confident, fully knowing. The cumulative effect of Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You, is the feeling that these women aren't posing for us, that their confidence and playfulness isn't for us. It would certainly feel like we arrived in the wrong place at the wrong time if it wasn't for the clear invitation, even beckoning, to investigate further.
But this narrative projection misses the central logic of the show’s imagery, namely that it both occludes the face leaving a blackboard for the projection of subjectivity and more severely erases their genitalia, leaving them mysteriously impregnated. Their breasts considerably smaller than would be commonly found in preggo porn, they are more like mannequins with mystified, essentially sterilized faces. As Helmut Newton once said, a nude without a face is dishonest.
What’s created in these different treatments of bodies and textures is, strangely and fascinatingly, a de-sexualized pregnancy where the entire bodily eroticism is evacuated and displaced into the surroundings, thus the stress on the textures around their bodies (trees, furniture, wall patterns etc.).
With the bodies desexualized, it is more of a fantasy about consumerism and hipster kitsch than it is about bodily eroticism.
The censorship is the central exhibitionistic performance on show. It is full for the genitals, extending the incidental censorship that was often performed by pubic hair in the 1970s, and attenuated for the faces, which retain the defensive capacity to glare out at the viewer. Effectively, this raises the fetish of the face and genitalia above all else.
Despite what the accompanying text says, these features make the show exhibitionistic rather than voyeuristic, in fact the possibility of voyeurism seems strictly refused (and the set-up of the gallery denies it anyway).
Beyond the symbolic suggestions of a desexualized pregnancy which, deprived of any orifice, can never come to fruition and so is sterile, pregnancy is reduced to a particular set of repeated linear patterns is given the function of decoration, like the plants that she covers in “gold” paint and fit into one corner to contrast with the scentless pseudo-potpourri of the dried plants across from them.
These qualities share something with Arkadi Lavoie Lachapelle’s recent show Alchemical Masturbation at Atelier Circulaire, where the narcissistic horror of the erotic was expressed through a sanctimonious fantasy of relationality that relied on the naturalization of a neurotic conceptualization of bodily autonomy and structural otherness filtered through a hackneyed regurgitation of 90s queer zine aesthetics (themselves retrograde) worked out through cluttered lithographs.