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Daddy Doo

13 July 2007

Male Parenting – its not all soft toys, breast feeding and Mexican wrestling

Exactly 100 years after Sir Truby King founded the Plunket Society to “help the mothers and save the babies” local artist Bryce Galloway presents Daddy Doo, a video installation inspired by the world of male parenting.

If Dr King’s philosophies on children’s health seemed revolutionary at the time, even he would not have predicted Daddy Doo.

Featuring the artist wrestling his two-year-old daughter, breastfeeding by strapping bottles to his chest and then allowing himself to be pumelled with soft toys, Galloway says his exhibition is a response to becoming a father and the modern pressure to capture a range of family moments on home video.

“I guess the typical home video is a lot of tottering first steps, beaming mothers … giggling children. The truth is, that’s just not how I respond. Everyday life is probably a lot more fraught”.

Bryce Galloway is a Wellington artist and lecturer who has released a series of albums since the early 1990s with his art school band Wendyhouse. Since 2001 he has been releasing a monthly fanzine Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People that over the past four years has chronicled his life as a parent. Frequently comic and surreal Galloway’s work has an ability to find the strange in the everyday. In the case of Daddy Doo, it’s the experience of male parenting.

“There aren’t many males out there when you go to the park ... I’m always hanging out with mothers. A big part of the show is just questioning ideas of normalcy or PC or whatever”.

One of the first such deviations was a wrestling match with his six month old daughter while dressed as a Mexican wrestler. Galloway subsequently repeated the video every six months, an amusing alternative to putting a notch on the wall to chart the kids height.

Consisting of seven videos for seven monitors which fade in and out, much of Daddy Doo was shot at home while looking after the kids. The exhibition was almost subtitled or how to exploit ones children, as Galloway remains painfully aware that his own daughters are somewhat unwitting identities in this installation. Rather than apologise for this liberty however, Galloway is pleased to court political incorrectness as a challenge to the current cultural sentimentality that frames our appreciation of the childhood experience.

What’s more, the kids are loving it. “Sadie remembers some of the things we shot as a cool game, and she gets to see me on Dad’s research day. She stills asks “can we play that game where I tie you up and throw my teddies at you?”

Like Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, Galloway’s video record is determinedly lo-fi, though some post-production audio and basic effects do ask the audience to ponder the footage as something other than a personal archive.

Film Archive mediagallery curator Mark Williams says Galloway is one of the most original artists in New Zealand. “Bryce has a unique ability to spy the absurdity and comedy in life's mundane activities and make that his art. It's a beautifully simple idea. After all what could be more strange and normal than being a parent?”

Daddy Doo 20 July – 4 August 2007, at the Film Archive