Linda Brescia

Birds in the Cockpit

FLIGHT Exhibition - Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 21 Jan - 11 June 2023

Comprising video performance, animation, painting and photography, Birds in the Cockpit is Linda Brescia’s new ambitious body of work that evokes a topical conversation of gender and identity into new conceptual and material realms.

For the first time in her art practice, she reveals her identity (her face) to the audience overcoming her fear of the camera. Despite Brescia’s self-consciousness whenever she sees an image of herself, she finds resonance in the historical reflection of powerful accomplished women in art. Channelling stories and factual accounts of women’s trials and triumphs to shatter the illusion of perfection—countering having been raised on pedestals— Brescia recognises her lived experience as power – her modus operandi. She sees her face as a mirror and her body as a vessel through which she performs the ritual cleansing of a falsely male-dominated art history so she can write her story - uncut, unfiltered and unashamed.

Linda Brescia’s tongue-in-cheek attitude stems from her childhood dream of becoming an actor that eventually manifested in alter-ego personas (akin to those of American photographer Cindy Sherman). Carefully peeling layers of her identity as a women artist, she boldly places her new “Flying Bird” persona in Birds in the Cockpit among the pioneers of women in art. Theatrically staged on various make-shift sets including an airplane’s cockpit, the artist’s four different “Flying Bird” personas consist of and enlist the help of pioneering female “aviatrixes”: Nancy Bird Walton, Nancy Leebold (Ellis), Rosemary Arnold, Aminta Hennessy and Amy Johnson. Through a series of Shermanesque self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing video performances involving costumes and props, satirical monologues and choreographed actions with improvised moments of hilarity, Brescia conjures her historical female comrades’ struggles to fuel her unfiltered and free imagination to take flight in a “cockpit that is for brave cunts” (both literally and figuratively).

On a personal level, Birds in the Cockpit is Brescia’s story of introspection and how one can overcome her long-standing fears of failure with a leap of faith. The added layers of her project reflect on questions of identity itself and how this intersects with notions of memory, equality, ownership, division of labour and, most importantly, one’s own experience of growing up in a colonial and patriarchal Australia and the world at large. A portrait of a feminist searching for a sense of belonging, her work utilises her observation, experiences, and multifaceted imagination to glimpse what it means to connect with collective womanhood. 

For Brescia, speaking of the feminist “truth” is a form of empowerment that gives hope and helps to fill the historical, cultural, and even personal voids women feel in any given time and place with new possibilities. Accordingly, voicing feminist actions and experiences is inseparable from the artist’s present and future. Through her passion, extensive research and tongue-in-cheek approach to art making, Brescia encourages women not to be scared anymore and proposes a nothing-to-lose attitude as the official mantra of womanhood with a loud and clear proclamation: “Fuck everyone who told us (women) we weren’t able to do something, be something, because of our sex, our innate weakness - It’s about time to do what we want.”

 Video Stills, Birds in the Cockpit, 2023 Videographer Dara Gill