Reflect, an exhibition of works by Monali Meher is set up such as to simulate the original show held in Vienna during the artist's residency programme there. The present show largely comprises a white framed screen constructed to indicate display and standard windows that have mainly photographs and images by and of the artist. A side projector flashes images of the original perishables that were on display at the show in Vienna.Meher's work situates itself on the temporal and the permanent, sourcing into photography, assemblages and performances, featuring female sexuality, the advertising industry and food, on the personal through letters and the use of self-images and the remote. The work is about the intriguing scape of female desires and male voyeurism. Occasionally, it teeters tentatively into the undefined areas of social control, of sexuality and sexual liberation.The work makes acute reference to a society in the grips of rampant consumerism and a repressive political system. At its mosteffective, the work holds trenchant yet breezy expressions of connections between freedom and sexuality, and food and sexuality.Meher's work brings to mind Madonna's book Sex published in the early '90s. With all its commercial implications this book placed female fetishical and the overtly sexual, firmly into the mainstream. It was natural that such issues, over time, would be readdressed. Over the now well-trodden path of female fetishism and sexuality, has emerged much work that either presents an admirable depth to the original concept coupled with a sincerity in argument or work that lacks a robustness and maturity and seems only to reinstate the familiar of feministic sexual thinking. Most of Meher's work reflects the latter and what has now become almost a cliche.Even earlier to Madonna, Cindy Sherman in the late seventies produced what today are generally held as classics in the photography world. The photographs that inspired feminist-oriented interpretations confidentially identifiableas women's art were self modeled. Later, through the faceless models of the dummies she used were staged the familiar and the unfamiliar - with the dummies engaged in incorrect activities and showing unabashedly their proclivity for the sexual.The attempt by women photographers to produce stereotypical and eventually tedious repetitions of thoughts they aim to subvert is wearisome. Take for instance what one makes to be the artist's own nudes in this show, that recall Sherman's early images. As a send-up of soft porn, these images touch upon the familiar power structure that operates between photographer and model and the possibilities in the reversal of roles. One wonders whether the artist in emulation of such trends is concerned about such issues specially since this show is not supported or accompanied by any texts, so vital in such temporal shows.
