Lost Girls
Caoife Power

BLINDSIDE ARI 2023

https://blindside.org.au/program/lost-girls 

This solo exhibition features my most recent series of paintings with printed lithography. Finding discarded portraits of girls on the streets around Melbourne, I have taken my time to paint over them. 

‘Lost girls’ are both literal and metaphoric. In straightforward terms they are just discarded paintings. However I can’t help but feel uncanny when walking past. What does it mean to leave a girl on the side of the road?

As a lesbian, I feel a sense of responsibility to find a way for these lost girls to come back into life. Repairing their lost identities. How can they be seen again?

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Having also been the subject of the gaze, in full view while feeling discarded, I recognise this immediate experience of homophobia, undesired romance manifesting.

In defiance of letting them just sit there, I take the time to paint over them. Each made with tenderness, not to completely conceal their presence, but to redefine their worlds through the action of my own body.

Perhaps this exhibition forms a room of self-portraits. Perhaps they are all lovers. Either way, they form a world of repeated declarations: ‘we’re here, we’re queer’.

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Public performance:
'Lost girls: Letters to my lovers' is a queer/ lesbian closing celebration of poetry, chats, readings and art from queer artists and writers: Kari Lee McInneny-McRae, Sunny Morris, Beau Lai, Angela Powell and Emily Kostos, who will each offer their own response to the exhibition.

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Image credits:

Caoife Power, Lost girls, Blindside 2023. Photography by Sebastian Kainey. Courtesy the artist.

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Caoife Power, Lost girls: Letters to my lovers, Blindside 2023. Photography by Silkom Powell. Courtesy the artist.