Alice

'Alice' The Nunnery (Upcoming: East)

Children epitomise purity and innocence, or so the myth goes. These attributes can be traced to Christianity and the Enlightenment, when childhood was first celebrated as the state least tainted by social mores and sexual corruption. Through their magazine, touring exhibitions and talks (see ICA vents), Alice set out to explode the myth.
HAYVEND offers original art for quid. My box contained a dolly-sized pair of vellow knickers, presuniablv a dig at the thriving Japanese market for schoolgirls' knickers. Lucy Wood's glass and steel reconstruction of a playground roundabout resembles a sinister, mechanical spider. Rose Thomas's small sculptures explore the psychosexual undercurrents between par- ents and offspring. I like a ventriloquist's dummy, a miniature man straddles the lap of a giant boy; fantasies of omnipotence and potency? Sophie Rayner asks adults about their infant aspirations; their answers shat- ter uniform definitions of childhood into a thousand class-coded shards. Dawn Mellor',s paintings probe extremes of viola- tion; a small girl has poked out her eyes with drumsticks, another smiles through syphilitic lesions. Permindar Kaur explores gender stereotyping. Mutant male/female pictograrns crawl over the fleecy surfaces of girlie dresses. Machiko Edmondson's mas- sively enlarged, closely cropped, photo- realist baby portraits strip the infants of cutesy-pie connotations; their dribbling mouths become moist sexual gashes. Tracey Moffatt's photo-text works isolate the harmful remarks that parents unthink- ingly level at their adolescent offspring ('Her father's name for her was 'useless' "). Parents take heed: consider the years of analysis that it will take to fix the damage.
Tonia Guha