SOFT POWER: THE PINK PROJECT | Jessie Adams

Opening: Friday 14th June 6.00-9.00pm Including a performance by NQW at 7.30 pm

//////////////////////////Come to the show, wear pink, and get your pink portrait taken.

Exhibition: 14th June - 23rd June

Pink: a colour once used to enforce gender conformity, now reclaimed as soft power. Moving away from simplistic, capitalist stereotypes such as princesses and Barbie dolls, the colour pink is being utilised as a method of resistance.

The subjects of this photoseries use pink as a tool to express themselves and, for some, a tactic to display their queerness. Pink is becoming a way for everyone on the gender spectrum to push back against oppressive expectations.

Cee, one of the exhibition's subjects, is a queer non-binary writer, researcher and performance artist. They use pink to interrogate gender “I don’t remember consciously seeing somebody dressed head to toe in pink and thinking, ‘that’s how I want to present,’" they said, "but when I dyed my hair pink for the first time something clicked into place. It felt like a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to all of the preconceived notions people have of my gender. The pink colour blocking came pretty soon after that. The more thought I put into curating my outfits around the colour, the more powerful I felt.”

Pink is pretty, pink is punk.

Pink is visibility - it is a means to take power, tell our stories and represent our community. Pink is a banner.

Soft Power is a print-based exhibition of digital inkjet portraits and a corresponding risograph zine by emerging Melbourne artist Jessie Adams. The prints and the zine explore the psychological, political and personal interpretations of the colour pink, as used by a diverse group of individuals.