It’s a nice day for a white wedding on the Cambridge Heath Road. In Leo Costelloe’s small exhibition, the young Irish-Australian artist is taking a critical deep dive into the tropes of weddings: the superstitions, the pressures, the meanings, the aesthetics. Costelloe sees the ‘wedding’ as a deeply contrived system of societal pressure, designed to form a specific feminine identity and perpetuate specific feminine norms.
A creepy 1930s doll stares out of the window, a veil covering her face, perfect lace squeezing her tiny body. Two blonde wigs hang off a wall opposite twisted, impossibly fragile wedding totems; silver cutlery wrapped in ribbon and flowers, the old something borrowed, something blue. There’s a Polaroid of a dove, another of an androgynous bride, on frames of etched silver.
It’s all perfect, white, fragile, petite, and satisfyingly beautiful in its own way. It’s sort of like the world’s most austere bachelorette party. You could argue that marriage as an institution isn’t something desperately in need of critical discourse in 2024. But Costelloe is adapting it and twisting it to their own needs, to explore how one person’s perfect day is another’s intentional, oppressive and nefarious shaping of gender norms.
