In the celebrated series The Birthday Party, Australian-born, Paris-based artist Vee Speers crafts a whimsical world where children engage in a creative game of dress-up without rules. Initially, Speers embarked on the project with the intention of capturing ‘the last days of childhood,’ before her children became teenagers. Over a span of two years, Speers persisted in photographing her daughter and her daughter's friends, culminating in the development of the entire series.
The work on offer, The Bubble Girl, (Untitled #16) which features Speers’ daughter was the most important image made for this project and the eventual cover of the corresponding publication. To capture the nostalgic childhood experience of blowing bubbles, Speers utilized a sticky material colloquially known as 'balloon paste' in France, recognized for making bubbles with a duration of approximately three minutes. Reflecting on the creation and photoshoot of this image, Speers recounts:
“This was the only picture in the series that I sketched before I started, and it came out exactly the way I had drawn it. I found the outfit from a dance show she’d done at school, a kind of swinging skirt thing. Then I wanted a big Marge Simpson hairdo, something totally exaggerated to go with the circles and the balloon. A hairdresser came in and built it. He blew up a regular balloon and pasted some hair of the same colour on to it, like papier-mache.”
As demonstrated by the current work, each child takes center stage against a grey wall, directing the viewer's attention to the styling and props. The restrained color scheme and attire predominantly reference the past, yet these images also conjure a feeling of futurism or an alternate reality. Initially rendered with black and white film, Speers later determined that color was an essential element. Subsequently, she introduced various hues using Photoshop to enhance and transform the images. Susan Bright contends in the book's forward that Speers has ‘succeeded in choregraphing characters that offer allegorical glimpses into the daily battles of life by learning to adopt various masks through the art of performance.’
Speers’ work has been acquired by the Sir Elton John Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum 21C, and The George Eastman House, amongst many other esteemed institutions. She is an internationally exhibiting artist whose works have been published in over 60 magazines and in 3 sold-out monographs.
2007 Chromogenic print, printed 2024, flush-mounted. 35 x 28 in. (88.9 x 71.1 cm) Signed, numbered 'AP2' and annotated '16' in ink on an artist's label accompanying the work. One from an edition of 8 plus 2 artist's proofs.