sally mckay and lorna mills

Lorna Mills and Sally McKay

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Check out the front pages of the current issue of Prefix Photo for my digital project about the Muskwa Kechika. We have an exhibition coming up in February at the Dawson Creek Art Gallery showcasing work by everyone who participated in the Muskwa Kechika Artists Exploration Camp. I'll be showing a dvd with a little bit of narrative and a lot of goofy home-style effects.

Fascinating story in the Globe yesterday about the Canadian art magazine Blackflash. The next issue has a story by Kyla and James Legard called "The Last Taboo: Childhood Sexuality and Censorship." After what sounds like quite a bit of contention, Backflash has decided to print the story with blank spots & urls in place of the intended illustrations. The "self-censored" images include Mapplethorpe as well as a cutsie painting of a little girl on a park bench by Millais called Cherry Ripe, which the Globe did reproduce online. Globe writer James Adams describes the painting as, "one of the most popular images of the late Victorian era, with prints displayed in millions of homes throughout the British Empire. In the last 25 years, however, some have argued its popularity 'bespeaks the existence of widespread covert pedophilia in Victorian society.'"

I just read a very good essay, "The Folly of Defining 'Serious' Art," by Amy Adler in a book about the complexities of censorship called The New Gatekeepers. Adler says...

"...even in this most justified area of censorship law, the legal solution has proved problematic in two ways. First, in our rush to protect children, we have expanded the definition of child pornography dramatically. It has become so broad that at its borders it endangers speech that almost all of us would agree ought to be protected. For example, the definition is so broad that now something can be 'child pornography' even if the child depicted is wearing clothes. In this way, child pornography law has come to threaten ordinary family pictures as well as important art that depicts children."

[...]

"Even as it combats the sexualization of children, I believe that child pornography law has also contributed to a world in which we scrutinize children for sexuality in a way that we never did before. In this way it inadvertently fosters the sexualization of children."

Hey teacher! Leave those kids alone.

Note: I feel a strong affinity to the last statement, above, by Adler. I have decided not to repost the Millais painting, nor to make links to contemporary artists who I feel have unjustly come under this particular legal lens. I don't like the inevitable scrutiny that this context would impose, and I don't want any part of it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Blackflash took the action that they did...if so, I think I understand the decision.