The story of Callisto is of sisterhood governed by strict rules, of deception, rape, shame, transgression, judgement, social exile, maternal estrangement and symbolic redemption.

 

As told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Callisto was a follower of Diana: a favourite among the hunter goddesses’ followers, all of whom were bound by an oath of virginity. But the great god Jupiter conceived a burning passion for her, and when he spotted Callisto at rest after hunting, he disguised himself as Diana and approached to embrace her. Callisto soon realised the deception and struggled to escape, but was overcome. Callisto felt burdened with shame when she returned to take her place among Diana’s nymphs, and she hid the loss of her virginity from them. Her secret was discovered when she was forced to remove her tunic to bathe and her swollen belly was revealed. Diana forbade her from polluting the sacred water, and cast her out.

Taking the story of Callisto as its departure, Part 2 of Alexis Hunter: Money Art Sex explores themes of sexual threat, sisterhood and the bitchy jealousy long attributed to women. In her art, Hunter explored how the fetishisation of women’s bodies, the promotion of unrealistic beauty ideals, and the aspiration to a glossy lifestyle were bound up in the the cultural convention that women were in competition with one another. During the 1970s in London, she was part of feminist organisations including the Women’s Art Alliance and the Women’s Workshop of the Artists Union. This era of progressive sisterhoods, of idealistic codes binding art and life, was also marked by fractures and disagreements.  

The Metamorphoses have inspired many works of art – perhaps most famously Titian’s Poesie, which includes a devastating dramatisation of Diana exiling Callisto. Although Hunter’s return to painting in the 1980s was controversial among her feminist contemporaries, part of her project was the exploration of mythic archetypes and their endurance in art: not only the gods of the Greeks and Romans, but the foundation stories of her native New Zealand. The exhibition closes with the tale of Maui, the first man, and Hine-nui-te-pō, the great goddess of death and the underworld.