Stacking the deck
Local burlesque queen Gypsy Wood is looking to be dealt with - and Andrew P Street fancies himself a gamblin' man
Drawing inspiration from the golden age of burlesque, Gypsy is about to bring her love of kitsch to the Arthouse Hotel
Gypsy Wood's name has long been synonymous in Sydney with 50s glamour and Golden Age Hollywood burlesque, so it should come as little surprise that she's set to release her own version of that classic objet d'tease: her own deck of vintage-style pin-up playing cards, featuring 52 shots of Ms Wood against a series of colourful backdrops representing various cities of the world.
"When I was younger my little sister had a deck of vintage playing cards, the pin-up ones, and I was just obsessed with them for a very long time. All the different poses and style of the girls and how they were so pretty and innocent and yet so naughty and suggestive at the same time: sort of erotic, but nice," she giggles coquettishly. "There were those two sides, that contrast. I guess doing burlesque and growing up in a vintage clothes store, it was inevitable that I'd want to do my own set."
While it's an idea she's had brewing for a while, Gypsy's only recently been able to enlist the talents required to turn it into a reality. "It's an ongoing project that has finally come to life. I've been working with a photographer, Louise Whelan, for a number of years - she's been photographing me at all my shows and we've done some work together - and then I met an artist/animator Antoinette Starkiewicz. Annette and I came up with the idea of the cards being souvenir memorabilia. We wanted each card to be representative of a different city of the world."
Wood and Starkiewicz trawled through books and photographs selecting the settings and styles for each city with an eye to the kitschier side of the street, in keeping with Gypsy's obsession with travel-themed knick-knacks. "Yes! Spoons, combs, Eiffel Tower statues, hats... all sorts of funny things. I've travelled so much and I love snowdomes and little necklaces and key-rings from different cities, little trinkets that remind you of places," she explains. "It's very olde-worlde and something I've always really loved. So it's a combination of cheesecake pin-ups and vintage travel memorabilia."
While one can predict what sort of cities a burlesque-themed pack of cards would likely contain - New York, Paris, New Orleans and the like - Gypsy is quick to point out that some of her and Starkiewicz's choices were not as obvious as you might presume. "We are actually putting in cities that you wouldn't expect," she points out, "such as Beirut."
An interesting - and potentially controversial - choice. After all, one would imagine that Lebanon wouldn't exactly have a thriving burlesque scene.
"No, no," she giggles. "But that's sort of the contemporary angle of it - it's not just your average cities. There's so many old vintage posters for Miami and New York that people have visited so much, but we wanted to travel beyond those places to, say, Kenya and India and other places that perhaps weren't traveled to so much in the 40s and 50s."
Gypsy Wood launches the exhibition of a selection of images from her deck of cards at the Arthouse Hotel on Thu 26 Jun, with performances by Gypsy and Amelia Wood and music from DJ GoldFoot.