The Land Squeezed The Life Out Of Me – Double Vision Artist Exchange Program
Installation, Logan Art Gallery QLD and Tea Tree Gully Gallery SA, 2012-2013
Sheep’s wool, alpaca wool, possum wool, synthetic yarn, cotton, screen printed fabric, ceramic buttons, pink petticoat, custom made arm chair, and window frame (1m x 3m x 2.5m)
In 2012-2013 Chrys Zantis was chosen to participate in the city of Onkaparinga’s Double Vision Artist Exchange Program. Zantis’s installation work is influenced by feminist theory and mythology. She explores the role of female crafts in conceptual art and in the construction of contemporary female identity.
The Land Squeezed The Life Out Of Me was made as a response to a conversation with a local Onkaparinga resident. On the landscape all looks lush and neat with blooming rose bushes flagging the rows of vineyards but beneath the surface lays the tale of the farmer’s wife being seduced and lured to leave her cosmopolitan European city to toil at mother natures surface in Australia. She falls into the rhythm of the seasons year after year becoming a slave to her romantic illusion of this rural lifestyle. Her work on the land is never finished. She never escapes the farm’s grip. In the back of her mind is the craving to feel sexy and invigorated again but when she is dead tired and resting in her beloved comfy armchair she dreams that the land was squeezing the life out of her. The paradox lies in the action of the chair’s arms, which began to roll in on the unsuspecting woman and at the same time Mother Nature’s bosoms cradled her weary head with her soft warm embrace.