Janieta Eyre

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Lady Lazarus

September 9 - October 26, 1999

Cristinerose Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Lady Lazarus, a series new black and white self-portraits by Toronto-based photographer Janieta Eyre.

Named after Sylvia Plath's poem of the same title, Lady Lazarus is inspired by Alchemy and The Book of the Dead. Existing in a place endemic of the past and the future, these self-portraits explore themes of death, resurrection and genetic engineering. Accumulations of memory, Eyre's montages evoke incarnation in a surreal world of visual fictions.

Comparing herself to a female version of Christ awakened from the dead --one with nine lives to her credit-- Plath writes, in the last stanza of the poem: "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." The verse applies, as Stephen Lemons writes, equally well to the pale, waifish, auburn-haired Toronto photographer, whose bizarre self-portraits recall the photographs of Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman with an added touch of Charlie Chaplin. Through her surreal gothic masquerade, Eyre transforms herself into a powerful, post-modern succubus, as deadly as she is alluring, as bewildering as she is mesmerizing.

By using elaborately constructed postures and scenarios, Janieta Eyre offers the viewer a hysterical look at the fascinating drama of self-awareness. Eyre uses crinolines and knee-high stockings, balaclava ski masks, heavy eye paint, peek-a-boo blindfolds, Edith Sitwell-style lampshade hats, Edwardian-era shoes and nurse aprons to create an obscure realm of illusion, allusion, and revelation. These elements, together with the presence of singletons, twins and triplets, engage the secret language of hand signs and symbols, and elaborate upon an autobiography that could easily have been written by hundreds of different authors.

Eyre's previous photographic series include Rehearsals, 30 self-portraits in which she staged her own death, and Incarnations, a sequence of 100 or more self-portraits that investigate the doppelganger.

Janieta Eyre has captured the attention of an international audience with recent solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, Italy and Iceland. Her work has been exhibited widely and belongs to public and private collections in Canada, the United States, Iceland, Europe and Korea.