>>PREVIEW
DIANA THORNEYCROFT: THE CANADIANA MARTYRDOM SERIES
Runs until October 14
Skew Gallery
Diana Thorneycroft is the kind of visual artist who is able to laugh through all of her pain. The Winnipeg-based photographer currently has works on display at Skew Gallery in an exhibition titled The Canadiana Martyrdom Series.
In her studio, Thorneycroft spends countless hours arranging lifelike dolls on elaborate sets to create scenes that poke fun at our national heroes – and perhaps at ourselves.
Wayne Gretzky, Anne of Green Gables and even the much maligned Celine Dion show up in Thorneycroft’s spoofs that she then photographs in order to create colour digital inkjet outputs that measure as large as 40 by 50 inches.
What binds Thorneycroft’s icons of collective Canadiana is the torture they are being put through. Anne is maimed and her breasts are bleeding, Celine is being forced to walk through a field of spikes at the Calgary Stampede and Gretzky (wearing an Edmonton Oilers jersey) is shackled to a tree in a crucifixion-style pose that can only mean the Great One’s final moments are near.
In each of these tableaus of terror, either human, or animal, look on with expressions of interest that range from mild to none at all. Thorneycroft is a brilliant satirist who conjures such imagery to make the point that apathy, pain and destruction of the soul are (unfortunately) everyday occurrences.
If we are willing to sacrifice our national icons, Thorneycroft seems to be saying, then surely the rest of us stand no chance.
This all sounds like heavy stuff for a collection of colour photographs of plastic dolls that, at first glimpse, will make many who view them laugh aloud. However, underneath the shiny veneer of spoofdom, these superb works carry a sincere message about how pain is a commodity that’s traded like pork bellies and crude oil.
Pain is not new territory for Thorneycroft. She has spent her adult life exploring the topic, sometimes creating photographs that are so difficult to look at – as was the case for her 2002 exhibition, The Body, its Lesson and Camouflage – that many preferred to turn away and pretend that human suffering does not exist.
Thorneycroft returns to this trough of torture repeatedly because of her own life experiences. In a recent interview she spoke of being hospitalized five times before she was one and how her work "references strong body memories of being hurt as a child."
Now she uses this catalogue of excruciating memories to create a photographic tourniquet for her mind and soul. By doing so, she has created a body of work that will endure intellectual and visual scrutiny.
Diana Thorneycroft is now beginning to receive international attention for her photography. Make a trip to Skew Gallery to view the torture of some well-known Canadians to find out why. |
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