woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131\nWritten on a white wall outside the gallery in a scrawling, lower-case font that was too polished to be graffiti but too gestural to be signage, the phrase \u201cbang your face back together\u201d announced Sarah Clifford-Rashotte\u2019s third solo show at Toronto\u2019s LE Gallery. It was a fitting introduction to the artist\u2019s newest body of work which plays with themes of vanity, personas and the violence of self-fashioning. Blending collage, drawing, painting and writing, the exhibition lived up to its name. Though No Poetry<\/em> reverberated with images of women\u2019s faces, they were resolutely anti-poetic. Cobbled together from pieces torn out of fashion spreads or obliterated by Clifford-Rashotte\u2019s frenetic scribbling, her female figures are a brutal pastiche of consumer culture that recall Surrealist strategies of collage and automatic drawing, meant to reveal the jarring and disjointed psychic effects of mass media on the subconscious.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nUsing collage to comment on media representations of women might appear a worn, even clich\u00e9d strategy, but there is an ambivalence and ambiguity to Clifford-Rashotte\u2019s work that lends it a fresh sense of introspection and complicity. In a series of ten small photocollage works, for instance, Clifford-Rashotte pieces together women\u2019s faces from fragmented facial features to create eerie portraits, evoking distraught ing\u00e9nues ejected from Disneyworld (Minnie Mouse Girl 2<\/em>, 2010) or psychotic Barbie androids (Stacey<\/em>, 2010). Held together with bits of masking tape, these hybrid figures are paradoxically menacing yet fragile, a tension brought to a fever pitch in the series Family Portrait 1<\/em> (2010) where three women, hugging and posing for the camera, have had their faces erased with a white pencil crayon. In another group of large-scale, mixed media drawings along the opposite wall, Clifford-Rashotte\u2019s methods of effacement continue with colourful and sketchily rendered portraits, including the Large Dramatic Fainting Girl (2010) with her eyes blacked out and hand-scrawled sentences covering her face, and My Real Fun Real<\/em> (2010)\u2009\u2014\u2009undoubtedly the standout of the show\u2009\u2014\u2009a mass of beautifully rendered swatches that obliterates Clifford-Rashotte\u2019s own name, repeatedly written in shaky cursive across the bottom of the composition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Accompanied by a small, zine-like artist book, No Poetry<\/em> functioned as a meta-narrative for Clifford-Rashotte\u2019s practice as a whole and extended the artist\u2019s ongoing archive of found images and tongue-in-cheek musings published on her blog (sarahcr.wordpress.com). There, as in the exhibition, fashion photography and impressionistic drawings are re-framed through the artist\u2019s wry personal commentary. Cryptic and crossed-out phrases, such as \u201ctried to control my ocd to the best of my ability today. think i did pretty well,\u201d hint at a personal compulsion to look at and manipulate these images, suggesting that there may be a strange kind of satisfaction derived from seeing ourselves reflected in this weird new breed of female figure.<\/p>\n