Linda Dement | Queer Australian Art

Linda Dement, Typhoid Mary, 1991
Image courtesy of the artist.

Bio

Linda Dement (b.1960) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist who began exhibiting in 1984. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) from City Art Institute, Sydney in 1988. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual. Her work deals with issues of disturbance, commingling psycho-sexual corporeality and the digital and electronic, giving form to the difficult territory of the unbearable and conflicted. Along with Australian artist collective VNS Matrix, Dement's work pioneered Australian cyberfeminism in art. Cyberfeminist politics and poetics used technology to deconstruct gender stereotypes in mainstream culture, and proactively situated women in relation to the rise of electronic culture in the early 1990s.

Some of Dement's early works came under censorship by the Australian Government. Typhoid Mary (1991) was taken to the NSW Parliament as being "obscene" and subsequently came under the classification of the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature as "not suitable for those under the age of 18." In My Gash (1999) also received a formal "Restricted" classification.

Dement's programmed and still image work has been widely exhibited internationally and locally, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, Ars Electronica Austria, multiple International Symposia of Electronic Art and Impakt Media Arts Festivals in Europe. She is twice winner of the Australian National Digital Art Award and has been awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts. Her work is held in collections such as the Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Australian Video Art Archive, New York Filmmakers Co-op and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.