Gender Reveal, 2018
video installation

Commissioned for The TV Show, 30 November 2018 – 24 February 2019, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Wollongong Art Gallery

Gender Reveal is a video installation that incorporates visual elements from the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians (KUWTK). I am interested in the ritualisation of fertility and femininity that the show proposes through its portrayals of family, childbirth and child rearing: personal moments and milestones, magnified and monetised.

– JD Reforma

The femininity of KUWTK’s central matriarchs is both hyper and conventional, exemplified in their obsession with and fetishisation of flowers – organs that facilitate reproduction in plants and have evolved to represent any number of complex rituals and emotions related to the continuation of the human species, sex included.

Celebrity ‘fleurologist’ and event stylist Jeff Leatham is responsible for the dense, floral-encrusted installations that have furnished almost every Kardashian event in recent years. These include baby-showers, weddings, and ‘gender reveals’, a recent phenomenon that has proliferated through social media whereby expectant parents reveal the gender of their child through a variety of playful mechanisms e.g. the release of pink coloured balloons to denote a girl, or the cutting of a cake to reveal blue sponge layers to denote a boy.

Gender Reveal reveals the contructedness of gender and performative parenting: large-scale photographs of flowers, cut out and drooping under their own weight; walls pregnant with expectation; and a family intent on keeping up with its own production.

Photos: Zan Wimberley