Carolyn McKay in Conversation with Brian Joyce
Sunday 3 July 2022
2pm
Join us for a conversation between Carolyn McKay (visual artist and University of Sydney criminologist) and Brian Joyce (creative and performing arts practitioner and University of Newcastle academic). They will discuss the criminal law context of Carolyn’s Crime Scene Motel exhibition, their individual creative responses to trauma sites, as well as their performative collaborations critiquing the ethics of true crime works.
Background to the Crime Scene Motel exhibition .
Crime Scene Motel examines the motel room as a site of violence and transgression. Motel rooms present a unique conflation of intimacy, privacy and anonymity with transience, motor vehicles, strangers, sex and the uncanny. This body of work emerged from McKay’s teaching of Criminal Law at the University of Sydney Law School when she became aware that a series of strange, supernaturally-inspired sexual assaults had been committed in cheap motel rooms. When McKay realised the motels were nearby in the Inner West, she did a quick drive-by. Located on major arterial roads, the motels were decaying remnants of mid-century dream holidays and she immediately decided to stay. Since that time, McKay has found many urban and regional motels that are sites of petty crimes, sexual violence, meth labs and occasional murders. Her method has been to sleep at identified establishments and ‘forensically’ photograph each site: stained carpets, grubby furnishings, unremarkable appliances. In embracing the banal, the images provide mundane clues of extra-mundane human experience.
