Is it a craggy gulf? Is it a bed? By virtue or choice, Bridget Stehli says her artwork might be both. Before Stehli dusted off her “artifice-laden theatre cave” to be reanimated for an upcoming exhibition at PIERMARQ* Projects, a family of spiders had been living inside the work. “It was a bit of a bumpy move from the shed to Surry Hills, but we made it in the end. We can’t see the spiders, but they’re in the rafters. I hope they’re happy.” Stehli’s world, otherwise known as An Allegorical Cave for Lonely Kiss Fans, is home not only to arachnids but also to the displaced and dispossessed individuals of the Kiss fandom. Inside the cave-like structure, there are ecru-trimmed portraits and a downy satin-lined bed where an ad plays on repeat. 

Placed on top of the bed is a CRT television set where participants can dial in to the Fantasy Hotline for Lonely KISS Fans, a video work that plays on a loop. The television commercial opens with a Kiss member lying languidly, open-chested while adult chat lines spiral in curlicue. The audio was lifted from an old VHS tape Stehli unearthed after days of deliberation listening to old tapes to find the right sound. Everything is laden with suggestiveness. The cave is a place of refuge by the way of Plato, Süskind—in Süskind's book Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille resorts to living inside a cave because he doesn’t want the stench of humans to infiltrate his nose. The retreat is not borne of physical need but of spiritual necessity. Stehli returns to the idea of forged identity as an arcane ritual. She asks what happens when desires between the public and private divisions of life are enacted in apparent solitude. Her answer seems to be that they become more fantastic. when we consider that the cave is both allegory and a place of refuge for those who have resisted conventional norms and want to come out of the shadows.

Stehli launched her career with 140 advertisements, colloquially known as Tart Cards. The work consists of 140 sex advertisements scrapped from telephone booths in England between 1995 and 2000. (The termination of the Post Office Act in 1984 led to the creation of the original gridded, framed and mounted advertisements.) Without fear of penalisation, sex workers began to mobilise and the cards became an unofficial cue of solicitation. The categories of women in the placements were as expansive as the colours of the Tart Cards—hues of lilac, magenta and buttercup yellows clashing with their markers of age, race, and post/pre-op orientation. There was one particularly striking card in pink and white riso-print advertising. It read, "A Chinese Model. 20 years old. Call Mona." The advertisement features a sweet babe with doe eyes and a swept cowlick baring her teeth. The advertisement is paired with a lavender panelled card that reads, “Trans, Pre-op, Busty and Sexy. Call now 0956 699 891.” The vortex of cards rattled on from Sweet Oriental, Bouncy Blonde, Irresistible Transsexual, and Asian Beauty. Each one is audited into our visual, pre-internet directory and ready for the taking. These cards might be considered prehistoric now, especially when racy digital infections and pop-ups are just a glitch away from our screens. But the women in Stehli’s 140 advertisements were working, not looking for fun. They are meditations on why women turned themselves into currency then and still do today.

Stehli works with a self-assigned rubric of gender-defying spectatorship, desire and performativity. Her practice is organised around painting, sculpture, and image-making—belied by a natural capacity to drill, fill, and build like a tradie. There is also a nod to Brechtian theatre in her work for it is an interior illusion. From the sides of this exhibition, the structure of Stehli’s work is more movie set than private domain. Shafts of bright light break up the lavender-dappled hues of the antechamber, and some paintings are mounted to the back of a wooden set, others tacked onto a cotton-candy striped wall. The linings of the wall are symbolic; they do not actually exist. 

Stehli’s art draws directly from the defective cinema she loves. “I’m thinking of the flat-as-plywood tombstones in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (actually, everything about that film) or the two-dimensional castle and alfoil swords in Outlaw of GOR. In theatre, that device is known as the alienation effect. In film, it is characterised by breaking the fourth wall. When you see the edges, like the back of the set or the string suspending a UFO or a boom mic creeping into frame, it breaks the illusion.” 

Parallel to the cave are portraits of Kiss fanatics ranging in size from a Polaroid to canvas. One features a child with orange hair and star cut-outs peeking from their eyes. Could this be a younger imitation of the artist? “I am quite sentimental about ephemera so it is typical of me to treat material with a certain amount of reverence. I found the subjects from online blogs where fans can submit family photos.” All of Stehli’s painted works are derived from found photographs, often downloaded from fandom archives in a conserved corner of the internet. 

Stehli’s fantasy call-in is a lifeline to fandom. “My partner has a kid, and he is the biggest fanatic I know. When I was making this work, I was thinking of him. I think there are hundreds of places where people can gather online to discuss their favourite things. But where are all the forums today for a band like Kiss? He wouldn’t have one to turn to.” For Stehli, the unavailability is not so much a crevasse but more a blip. Build from the ground up, so long as you need. Any zealot can resurrect the past, she says.