As the sky blanketed Paddington under unbridled rain, most people found the cosiness of being indoors pleasant and inviting that the splattering of raindrops that looked to have ruin a few mini-dresses and shoes young women were wearing. Down the slopes of Comber Street, Sydney based artist Tanya Linney’s major show exhibition was a fixture at Global Gallery. A former model and now a firm exhibiting artist her point of difference in producing a dialogue about female forms and identity determined a consistent strong show that delved into The Style Press’ lasting stronghold on exploiting and manipulating the soul and veneer of femininity.
Her major works, hung canvassed on opposite white walls lined depictions of slashing, slicing, contorted overlapped scrappings and found imagery strewn in such a way they her made compositions provided a sardonic lattice of defaced faces unable to literally speak. In Linney’ use of vargarited watercolour techniques, whereby the recurring motif of eyes are prominent the integrated layers of pictorials and collaged cry out for a yearning to break free from entrapment.
Linney’s artworks evoke many contemporary gestures that over time have been displayed by the industry she was apart of. Fashion designers such as Stefano Pilato who in 2008, recontextualised all of his runway models’ faces appearing uniformed in black bobs and deep black lips. So as for the history of Martin Margiela who with makeup artist Inge Grognard consistently veiled and concealed the identities of his models to concentrate the eyes of the audience, affixed on his garments only.
Is there a curse or deep suffering as the perrenable undertones of Linney’s oeurve? That in the myriad of her distorted artwork collages they produce a feeling of numbness, that women incessantly portrayed in film, in paintings and in printed magazines their feeling and emotions are extinguished? ‘Voodoo Girl’ by Tim Burton illustrates a red-lipped zombie pinnned and scarred by sewing. Burton example can expressed the degradation of sexuality and the lost of social independence.
The depth of the Sydney artist’s work also elicits nascent female figures, ghostly shadows and man-made objects such as sharp utensils are confronting to the point of making references post-modern film. As a prime example, directed by French writer Olivier Assayas, ‘Demonlover’ produced in 2002 starring Danish actress Connie Nielsen and American actress Chloe Sevigny, the extreme depictions of sadomasochism, viewed by an easily accessible world-wide video feed are startling representations of how sexuality gestured in Linney’s artworks have lost all human sense of respectability – the female body now a seed of e-commerce and man’s depraved fantasies.
Whilst in previous, Linney has explored collage techniques in exhibition fruitful canvases displaying strips of pornographic material, she is not entirely hung on feminine depravity alone. In her 2006 and 2007 series of Dolls and Masks and Mannequins respectively, Tanya chooses to delve into human existence by mark-making beauty not as the idealised fantasy of the perfect slender body nor blonde but of une jolie-laide. Like British artist Linder Sterling (who also more recently collaborated with British-Australian fashion designer Richard Nicoll), the mish-mashing of female imagery underlines a more comforting allegory – that her caricatured artworks are committed for forming a dialogue that is determined to disturb print and advertising industry’s hellbent on warping female bodies for commercial viability.
