The Thousands

Bridie Connell is reporting live from Girl World. Hearts are made of candy, unicorns are pooing lip gloss, and ‘XXX’ is a sign-off rather than a rating. Part of this year’s much expanded Sydney Fringe Festival visual arts program, Tic Tac Toe is a multimedia look at the construction and manifestation of femininity in the pursuit of make-outs. Drawn from the personal, the anecdotal and her imagination, Connell has taken photos, made love hearts and put slogans on ‘em, and created illuminated signs to get across the kind of messages our totally crushing inner selves bring into consenting adulthood.

It’s a too much kind of a world, a smotheringly pink instance of what looks like a satire on girliness in an unmediated state. But it also reads as a critique of how ‘girls’ are taught to represent their desires to themselves, then taught that that representation is frivolous and needs to be filtered in order to achieve serious personhood. This double remove is totes unfortch, but the good news is that art is extremely low-carb.