Rewind: Janieta Eyre
Janieta Eyres recent self-portraits, shown in Toronto at the Christopher Cutts and Justina M. Barnicke galleries, are disarmingly ruthless. Tearing through art history and cultural imagery, Eyre tries on everything for size and then, just as quickly, discards it. Vividly bright, even childlike colours and flattened, painterly patterned spaces provide a backdrop for Eyres wildly eccentric posturing of the self.
But self-portraiture is, perhaps, not the right word to describe her photographs; the term is as much a throw-away as are the endless costumes and sets she uses in a series of tableaux where she appears, often twice, sometimes three times. There is a calculated randomness to her costumes, and the floral and checked backgrounds have the look of tablecloths or curtains tacked together. Eyre herself appears more assembled than posed; her body becomes a collage of costumes and objects: attached forks, fish, cut pages from a sign-language dictionary, cut-out images of her face attached to sticks and letters pasted to body parts. These, together, suggest an utter disregard for any symbolic import they may have (the body as representation, the body as phallus, identity as performance, etc.) by their sheer profusion.
Take, for example, The Last Minute of My Life (1998), a large, double-image work in which, in the first image, Eyre stands woodenly, hands placed in front, in a kind of prom dress replete with Mickey Mouse ears and a ribbon that masks her eyes. In the second image, the scene is identical, except that Eyre has turned to face the wall, showing us her back. Her hands pull out the sides of her dress as if to better align its lurid colour pattern with the rest of the close-up spaceto dissolve it almost into the shallow backdrop. The back of Eyres wrapped head becomes a blank space. Any notion of performance of self is vacated, as is any secure reference to one particular costume style, period or even art-historical movement. All becomes an abstraction.
In various works, Eyre alludes to the Dadaists disregard for symbolic meaning, Matisses decorative surfaces and patterns, even the Surrealists attachment to sexual symbols. In From the First Verse of the Book of Genesis (1998), she may have had in mind an infamous Surrealist group portrait in which head shots of Surrealist members with their eyes shut are montaged around a naked woman. Eyre replaces the Surrealists heads with multiples of her own, and she poses in the middle, scantily clad, with her eyes blacked out.
Overall, at first glance, Eyres work calls to mind the American artist Cindy Sherman. But deeper comparisons do not hold up. Shermans work is intensely cinematic and performative; the female self is pictured as an array of signs governed by cultural assumptions about femininity. To the seriousness of Shermans theatrical self, Eyres work is a vaudevillian romp through the cultural flotsam of self-imagery. It figures as an act of negation, a fresh start to addressing stale identity politics in art.
Fall 1999
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