KARIKE ASHWORTH
FEATURED IN THE BOMB SHELTER EXHIBITION SPACE
Inspired by cosplay and comic strip characters, Karike Ashworth’s persona Brave Girl considers how, why and when labels like ‘brave’ get assigned to women, girls and to popular culture heroines.
Brave Girl: The Warrior 2018 ‘documents’ Brave Girl’s running tour through regional Queensland between Mount Glorious and Mooloolaba, via Esk, Kilcoy and Toogoolawah.
The film parodies the Forrest Gump running sequence from the famous 1994 Robert Zemeckis film of the same name. As Brave Girl recreates this legendary film sequence, she runs as the ironic embodiment of ideal virtues for postfeminist women: hyper-femininity, strength, ambition, beauty, health, good grooming, sociability, self-assuredness, and optimism.
Except that, instead of doing so virtuously, in a way that is acceptable and worthy of well-socialised women, Brave Girl is absurdly running for no particular ‘worthy’ reason at all – besides, of course, because it is “brave to be fast!”
IMAGE: KARIKE ASHWORTH, BRAVE GIRL: THE WARRIOR, 2018 (STILL).
