Canary presents:
FRIENDLY GIRLS SOCIETY
Tea and Sympathy

Exhibition 23 November - 3 December 2005

This exhibition inaugurates a new artistic concept named the Friendly Girls Society, which is a way of contextualising threads of aesthetic and conceptual investigation pertaining to social fantasy.  The society presents itself as a cultural antithesis to organisations like the Masons, simultaneously reaffirming and lampooning the fantasies and rituals that bind individuals within groups together.

Honorary Friendly Girls' portraits peer down from high on Canary's walls at the armchair bound viewer, whilst the friendly girls attempt to make attendees feel at ease with the occasional comforting word and cucumber sandwich or two. The ephemera of a legitimate society adorn the gallery and FGS anniversary tea towels will be sold.

FGS both reinvents the 'group' and sends it awry.  Structures are unsettled via the muddling of accustomed tropes, modern mythology and subcultures interlaced with domestic banality and its escapist fantasies, which produces ambiguity in order to confuse stereotypes and instigate inquiry.

Read essay On Tea and Sympathy, by Tracey Williams below

On Tea and Sympathy
by Tracey Williams

Written after the conclusion of the exhibition at Canary Gallery

The Friendly Girls Society was formed as a way of contextualising entwining threads of aesthetic and conceptual investigations relating to the idea of social fantasy. The society wryly presents itself as a cultural antithesis to organisations like the Masons - masquerading paraphernalia that's part old boys club, part subculture, part 'ladies sewing circle' and part Hollywood - which is at once a reaffirmation and lampooning of the fantasies and rituals that bind individuals within groups together. Its aim is to comment on and dislocate Imaginary social structures and norms, and highlight the way neutral symbolic constructs and signifiers become fetishised through a desire for a hinge onto which to hang a 'self'.

FGS was inaugurated by the Tea and Sympathy exhibition and performance. This included wall-based objects, sound, and (for purchase) gang patches and anniversary tea towels printed with a customised coat of arms. People were welcomed and offered snacks and tea - served from an old institutional tea pot and tea set by 'girls' in matching outfits (of pink tops parading the FGS coat of arms, black skirts and shorts, fishnets and gingham petticoats with frills).

A dissection of the event produced two threads of discussion. One of these focused on the concept of 'friendliness' as a significant aspect of this performance, which cited and aimed to be an antidote to the falsity and emptiness of feel-good maxims that groups preach. Giving 'friendliness' the status of a distinguished cultural object by placing it within a gallery context prompted close scrutiny of its function as a post-modern construct within a narcissistic and commodified society that has objectified the 'self' and deifies celebrity. The other strand of discussion centred on the irony that the performance brought in to play certain group characteristics that FGS was set up to comment on - as people across age, race and class were infected by and bought into the fantasy offered by the performance. Meanwhile, the odd person (a carbon copy car salesman for one) had their fantasy of the way things 'are' and 'should be' so rattled by Tea and Sympathy that they became agitated and angry.

Tea and Sympathy showed that FGS functions critically as an enigmatic ideal like Elvis Presley - sustained by its elusivity and consequent ability to appear as the fulfilment of many desires. The approach of reinventing the 'group' and simultaneously sending it awry produces ambiguity, which confuses stereotypes and instigates inquiry. This strategy also stakes a claim over and gives new possibilities to the cultural artefacts that fix identity and determine subjectivity - questioning their authority and raising the issue of authorship.

* The Friendly Girls Society has community-based events in the pipeline for 2006 and 2007. For more information or interest in participation contact tracewilliamsATxtra.co.nz or mandy.aharaATxtra.co.nz