Costumed doubles and avatars in Janieta Eyre’s photographic self-portraits
This article aims at furthering our understanding of costuming in self-portraiture through the analysis of Janieta Eyre’s photographic works. Exploring the fictionalizing potentialities of photography and flouting the conventions of self-portraiture, the Canadian artist stages her multiple doubles i...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2019-06-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/7864 |
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| Summary: | This article aims at furthering our understanding of costuming in self-portraiture through the analysis of Janieta Eyre’s photographic works. Exploring the fictionalizing potentialities of photography and flouting the conventions of self-portraiture, the Canadian artist stages her multiple doubles in a playful yet introspective way. The studio becomes an experimental huis-clos harbouring fantasy self-explorations. The costumes that she assembles allow for complex dramatizations of the othered self. In these performative self-fictions the costume constitutes a prosthetic device. Her burlesque impersonations address gender identity in a subversive way. Judith Butler’s view of gender as stylized repetition of acts chimes in with Eyre’s use of seriality and endless mises-en-abyme, while Paul Gee’s definition of projective identity as a liminal form of identity—an interface between the real and the virtual self—and other researchers’ exploration of the avatar in game theory shed additional light on Eyre’s use of costuming. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |