Woman with Salad (2016-ongoing)
Woman with Salad was first exhibited in Berlin in 2016 and has continued to be developed by Perry. It is a work for a lone or group of female performers who each concurrently enact a gesture, repeated continuously for an hour. The endless looping format of the GIF, from which Perry has sourced the movements enacted by the performer, echo the repetitive actions of female labour. These GIFs have been taken from stock image libraries, the performer mimicking the reductive images designed to be distributed and consumed by patriarchal capitalism.
2019
Presented by Seventeen for A Performance Affair, Brussels, 2019
Woman with Salad is a work for a group of female performers who each concurrently enact a single gesture, repeated continuously for an hour. These gestures derive from images and animated GIFs found in commercial stock footage libraries that depict women engaged in actions such as laughing while holding food, looking into a mirror, brushing their hair or drinking a glass of wine. These commercially produced images, designed to be purchased and dispersed throughout the wider broadcast media, depict stereotypically female actions, while being aimed at the current advertising industry also echo the manual and domestic tasks that women perform in historical painting.
With thanks to performers Maurane Colson, Marion Denne, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Fleur Khani, Chloe Nols and Ilse Wijnen.
2019
Presented by Focal Point Gallery
“Focal Point Gallery is delighted to host ‘Woman with Salad’, a performance by Emily Perry. Perry’s interest in the repetitive actions of women’s labour and the endless loop format of the GIF intersect with a comparison between contemporary stock imagery and Johannes Vermeer’s 17th century paintings of domestic women forever captured in precarious mundanity.”
‘Woman with Salad’ features seven local women, both actors and non-actors, performing commercial stock image actions such as laughing and gesturing with salad on fork, peeling apples and looking bored, sighing or sitting in yoga positions making slow gestures with a halved avocado. These women are animating patriarchal, sexist, reductive images of themselves to be consumed by capitalism. Their ridiculous performance, dumb, relentless enthusiasm and sarcastic, robotic delivery mocks and subverts agency. At first a one-liner, the performance becomes a grotesque cycle in which we are all implicit.
2016
The first iteration of Woman with Salad was at Centrum, Berlin in May 2016. Seven women repeat tasks based on what women do in stock imagery and in paintings to become live GIFs. Full performance duration 2 hours. Installation included a slideshow showing contemporary stock images and paintings by Johannes Vermeer.
With thanks to curator Natalie Weiland, photographers Stefanie Dietzel and Alexander Gehlsdorf and performers Zahra Banzi, Camille Darroux, Stefanie Dietzel, Lauren Heckler, Kyra Jacques, Nicole Michalla and Daphne Rouillard Urruchi.
Read a review of Woman with Salad by Hannah Moss here
2022
This new realisation of Woman with Salad was performed by one woman, mirroring the one woman of You’re on Mute which was exhibited in the adjacent room at Seventeen in 2022. It is an adaptation for a post-lockdown context, the figure trapped in a room, going from task to task, locked in a relentless cycle.
Woman With Salad was performed by Emily Kenneally.
These works were shown as part of Performance Exchange, a dispersed platform for performance art in commercial galleries.
You can view the acquisition document for Woman with Salad here.
2017
Restaged for In Plain Sight SheFest exhibition, at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield, 2017.
With thanks to Chloe Cochrane, Abi Dickinson, Naomi Gordon-Mckibbin, Laurel Morgan, Kate O,Brien, Jessica Razbully and Ellie Wilson.
2017
Restaged for Tribe17 International Art Festival, OXO Tower, London, 2017
With thanks to Ellen Kenyon Peers, Madame So, Emily Murayama, Livvy Lynch, Kaitlyn Walker-Stewart, Maria Sarkas, and Ginny Peszynska.
