Clip Cut Gel by Julia Riddiough

The artist film Clip Cut Gel tells the story of three men portrayed in the male hairdressing magazines the artist has collected from the 1980’s onwards. The portraits reveal amplified masculine characteristics; drawn from male stereotypes that we see in the visual language that surrounds us everyday; intentionally inverting male anxiety by injecting humour and anecdote. Clip Cut Gel plays with the way the male is looked at and builds it into a spectacle itself. Here the image of the man is seen as passive and raw material for the active gaze of the spectator (perhaps a woman?) as another structure of representation.