| Dressing up with Cathy Daley
FEATURE
CATHY DALEY
NewZones Gallery
Dresses are a continually recurring motif in the work of Toronto artist Cathy Daley. Her stylish oil pastel images draw on nostalgia for the elegant fashions she would pore over in magazines as a child, as well as a critical consideration for the subtexts inherent in them.
Daley’s second solo exhibition at NewZones continues her focus on the dress, but now incorporates figures... sort of. Extending beyond the frame of the page, the dresses remain prominent. The body is almost an afterthought, hopelessly consumed by the black pools of fabric. Legs emerge or disappear into the billowing forms, unconstrained by the shape of the wearer. These dresses don’t require any help from the wearer for support. Feet clad in stiletto heels are like extraneous appendages and rarely make contact with the ground.
Daley appropriates the child’s-eye view in her approach to her work. Oil pastel images drawn on vellum are hung with magnets on the walls, much like a drawing tacked onto a refrigerator. Like many children’s drawings, there is a disturbing subtext beneath the innocent-looking techniques – an all too accurate perception of the world as it’s presented to them. Daley’s images appear light and humorous at first glance, but it doesn’t take long for the subject to sink in, and all of a sudden you’re embarrassed for laughing.
While Daley’s works share a strong visual similarity to Andy Warhol’s stylishly detached drawings of shoes from the ’50s, they are also charged with a serious concern for the message portrayed in fashion magazines.
"In my work I don’t think there is a specific narrative really or sequential reading but I do see a lot of the images as being part of a kind of narrative or mythology or story of ‘woman’ or of a kind of socially constructed femininity," she says.
"I looked through lots of fashion magazines and became overwhelmed with the number of legs being portrayed," continues Daley. "Many of the postures and positions of the models are very passive and submissive and some of the legs are on display. I wanted to comment on these passive sorts of representations of women that exist."
Included in the exhibition is a three-minute stop-motion animation by the artist that puts in motion the amorphorous forms hanging on the wall.
"This is my first video and actually I started it in 1996 when I was drawing lots of slender evening gowns.... Then I started to get the idea of making an animation and having the dress become elongated and morphing into various shapes. So I started doing lots of drawings. I wanted it to have the old-time video feeling like things I saw as a kid in the ’50s and be a little choppy and crude." |
