Adolescence itself is a flirt with artifice, a kind of staged narrative. Felix Guttari spoke of adolescence as a revolution, linking the onset of puberty to perceptive mutations, which relate to space, body and time. It is a crisis time that beaks up and disorganizes the psychological and behavioural status quo, a threat to the semiotic world of adults.1 Adolescence can be seen as a set of behaviours and images, set up in order to contain and commodify it, as if it could be made to last forever.
Gemma Browne’s new body of work, Lily White, captures the freshness, innocence and possibilities of youth. She refers to Lily White as something pure, irreproachable, and clean. Made up of composites of images of teenagers from fashion magazines, the images strive to conjure a world of youth and its endless possibilities and optimism....
