GUY BENFIELD, LANE CORMICK, VITTORIA DI STEFANO

BRAZILIAN WAX MUSEUM
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Conceived by artists Guy Benfield, Lane Cormick and Vittoria Di Stefano, Brazilian Wax Museum was a three-way collaboration encompassing video, performance, painting, sculpture and sound.

"Brazilian Wax Museum pays homage to action painting and task oriented performance practices from the 60s and 70s, beards without moustaches, caftans, Marimekko design, Siamese cats and Tony Tuckson wannabes. Brazilian Wax Museum heightens this spectacle through audacious and futile explorations of champagne fountains, hot Brazilian nights and gravitationally challenged bourgeois lifestyle in suburban Sydney in the 70s. Brazilian Wax Museum presents video and environments which incorporate buffoonery, parody, chunkiness, the puerile, fashion and popular culture. We make pre-fabricated sets in which we perform a series of procedural actions. Some of these task-oriented performances allude to action painting, rituals and the essence of Ju Ju. We make mock modernist interiors suggesting Wallpaper* and copa2, and the multi purpose apartments designed for the modernist utopian city of Brasilia. These are patently unsuited to the expansive demands of abstract gestural paintings and task oriented performance art. Through movement and spatial disorientation we will attempt to make this configuration ridiculous. ‘Peace go with you, brother’” - The Artists, Brazilian Wax Museum

Brazilian Wax Museum was supported by the 2003 L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival.