Please join us in the Bookshop and meet the artist Julie Cook who will be presenting the East London Stripper Collective Files (E.L.S.C.). This is a collaborative book project that evidences the activism of a group of six women, juxtaposing the language of photographic portraiture and performance with evidence of social media as a site for participation, communication and public event organisation.
The work is important in the context of the gentrification of Soho and other less famous contexts for public erotic entertainment for both men and women. The work builds on the theoretical and aesthetic interest of Cook in how women address a culture where public nudity is encouraged commercially on the one hand, but venally criticized on the other. Cook believes that striptease culture can support both amateurs and professionals; encouraging the performance of sexuality and engaging with the complexities of voyeurism and contemporary issues of the female gaze. It is also a space for the public to see imperfection, rather than some far removed, digitally re-touched, virtuality.
On the night, Edie Lamort, ex-stripper, writer, performer and one of the original members of the East London Strippers Collective, will give an overview of the industry, its boom years and its decline and why it was necessary to become an activist and form the collective. The artist Julie Cook will be speaking as well.
Thursday, 19 July, 18.00 - 20.00, Bookshop.
Free event, no Booking.
Julie Cook, Senior Lecturer in photography at the University of East London, lives and works in London and is an artist whose work is photography based. For over 20 years Julie Cook has engaged with issues of voyeurism within personal and public spaces of the city. The E.L.S.C. FILES follows a number of books and work around the subject of the female gaze. This includes the award winning Baby Oil and Ice-Striptease in East London, the Las Vegas Diaries, Some Las Vegas Strip Clubs, Beauties of Today and Olympia Moments Ltd. Julie’s work was recently included in a group show, Paris Texas, with Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg in Dallas.
