A foregrounding of exteriority might also be read into Majid’s use of high visibility reflective ink in her wall-based works. The use of this material that is more commonly used on running and cycling clothes means that the image on the work is only viewable when the light catches it, or the viewer stands at a certain angle to it. The material’s usual function is to reflect headlights or streetlights and highlight the user, that is to raise the visibility of their exterior, shape and presence. This is both an assertive gesture (“look at me”) but also paradoxically a defensive gesture, acknowledging the vulnerability of the user in the face of more powerful and destructive forces.
This peculiar mix of insistence on exteriority and admission of vulnerability can also be read into Majid’s ‘Steam’ series. These works, made on mirrored dibond, show an image of the condensation on Majid’s bathroom mirror after a shower has steamed it up. There is frisson of an erotic charge - the steam on the mirror in a bathroom promises but does not deliver the reveal of a body but also a fragility that arises from capturing a moment that will shortly disappear.
It becomes clear that Majid’s insistent return to the surface of things and exteriority is deeply deliberately unstable, shot through with eroticism. Latex might be a second skin but its use in clothing is dependent on it being next to naked flesh. Its insistence on surface, on exteriority is dependent on a body beneath it that it can mould itself to. The two umbrella-like sculptural objects placed on the floor of the gallery are upturned offering their insides outwards to view. Again the works are made of latex but the exterior of these sculptures which are the side that viewers can see most of, is paradoxically the internal side of latex sheeting, unpolished and usually unseen. There is an implication here; if you are on this unpolished side of latex the you are, by logical extension, the body waiting to be enveloped by that material. This implication is heightened by the shape of these sculptures; these are objects that seem to be open to receiving something, perhaps as simple as the viewer’s body, rather than repelling it.
Elsewhere in Majid’s exhibition, a frosted acrylic screen forms a barrier for the viewer. Behind it, lit by a dull orange glow, is some sort of chair-based furniture, the type you might see in a gym or tattoo parlour. But this one seems to be missing most of its cushions, stripped back instead to its structural parts, folded up and propped up. Not only reduced in function, this once practical object is permanently out of reach behind the screen, the type that used to be popular in offices to demarcate ‘private’ workspaces.
Like the rest of the works in “dressing for pleasure” the work positions the viewer; in this case on the outside of its private space. The works that use reflective ink position the viewer where they can catch sight of the image, the work depicting condensation is installed in a corner of the gallery in a way that again strongly suggests where the viewer should stand to be able to see both components. The frosted acrylic screen is the most overt manifestation of this positioning of the viewer. The title of the exhibition might however be a clue to this strategy; the idea of “dressing for pleasure’ is suggestive of self-fashioning for one’s own entertainment, to be answerable to no-one but yourself. The half-recognised object behind the screen is in effect demanding privacy on its own terms, contorted into a shape that does not conform to expectations, happy in its own skin. Of course, unbeknownst to the viewer, that skin is latex, Majid having re-upholstered the remaining two cushions.
Concealment, self-pleasure and the act of the reveal to the other are in constant interplay in Majid’s work. The last (or first) work in the show is a close-up video of an eye following a beam of light. The gaze of the eye, located within the shadows, is drawn to light, to what that light might reveal. The act of looking from within our own walls, of looking out, is alternately rebuffed and welcomed, a constant interplay of pleasure, desire and refusal. Dress for pleasure at all means, but perhaps don’t think too much about whose pleasure you want to dress for.
