Frozen, Staged & Abstracted Moments (as part of My Kylie Collection)

Kathy Temin's current exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is a development of her investigation of fandom as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon. Frozen, Staged and Abstracted Moments (As Part of My Kylie Collection) consists of record cover sized fused glass panels depicting coquettish silhouettes of pop princess Kylie Minogue. In a reduced ice-cream or icing palette, Temin has created abstracted, pop-cultural images of Kylie that are harder and sweeter than their originals. Chocolate and strawberry figures are placed against white glass fields—or vice versa—to make pop cameo portraits, camp devotional icons. These are abstracted images of deified celebrity in the tradition of Warhol. Temin's glass works invoke the culture of fandom and celebrity in a playful and seductive way, teasing with the coy rhetoric of legs and other miscellaneous props.

The appeal of these works from Temin, who is better known for her use of soft, 'imperfect' materials such as fake fur and felt, is in the way that they transcend their visual sources and achieve a formal—perhaps classical—purity, allowing the viewer to enjoy the assertive materiality of her new glass medium.

Coinciding with the opening of her new exhibition will be the launch of Temin's limited edition artist magazine, A Magazine (As Part of My Kylie Collection). For this publication, Temin has solicited contributions from writers around the globe, creating a compilation of personal Kylie anecdotes as well as writings on the more general themes of fandom and celebrity. Contributors include James Angus, Polly Borland, Matthew Collings, Emily Floyd, Starlie Geikie, Poppy King, Adrian Martin, Nikos Papastergiadis, Lee Ranaldo, Scanner, Georgina Starr and Russell Storer. The magazine will be launched by Russell Storer, curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Temin has exhibited extensively in both Australia and overseas. In 2001, she produced her first body of Kylie related work, titled My Kylie Collection, for the exhibition Art/Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Her work is held by most major public collections in Australia. She was the recipient of an Australia Council residency at PS1 in New York in 1997 and, in 1999, won the prestigious Moët and Chandon Art Award.