| I came upon this body of collage work in early 2004, having been preoccupied with questions of lifestyle media’s “wish-producing dreamland” for quite some time, waiting for the idea to settle in the material form of an artwork. |  |
Gabi Trinkaus
I came upon this body of collage work in early 2004, having been preoccupied with questions of lifestyle media’s “wish-producing dreamland” for quite some time, waiting for the idea to settle in the material form of an artwork. It eventually did this, with me realizing that no material would provide a more self-explanatory and transparent nature to my intended way of criticizing the media than actual magazine paper. Pages from glossy magazines “cut to need” into clippings of various sizes, topics, and shades supply the source material for these works.
The leader on lifestyle media’s all-time favorite list, the “perfect woman,” led me to a portraiture style I’d describe as a “makeover.” Found media fragments originating from ads, fashion spreads, and beauty inserts are reconstructed on a larger scale by “dressing the skeleton” of a linear drawing on canvas with paper cutouts of various skin details.
The resulting works, headshots and bodies never fully covered by printed matter, allow the process to remain transparent, and the fragmentation of the image documents its creative process as well as the critical impact. Vulnerability shows in the unfinished faces’ empty spaces, through which the underlying drawing protrudes like the “cutting pattern” for a plastic surgeon.
Yves (2009) is a piece out of my “pin portraits” series, a number of small close-ups on foam board using pins for a more airy, seemingly unstable fastening method. Like most of the others Yves was named by selecting the “message” on one of the de-/re-contextualized paper swatches that more than once happen to be found and picked by chance.
I am never reluctant to use a “good find” and so there are others named …she’s born with it, Take off 14 years in 7 days, Gucci, and so on. As a consequence for review, owning the “talent of irony” might not turn out a disadvantage in the perception of my works.
Ideal Balance and I is another, out of my body portrait series, are three-quarter portraits of scarcely dressed women and men. They raise questions about idealized media imagery and identity creation in our contemporary “cut and paste” televised plastic surgery culture. Most of them face the viewer directly and straight on. Not all of them are at ease and some are posing, such as in Ideal Balance.
The aim is to exploit these poses and visual conventions of mass media glamour photography and in throwing the images back in shattered form, creating works with a disturbing, critical, and humorous content.
Ironically enough, more than survival our culture seems to rouse questions of success. The print media provides innumerable pages with answers on how this might look; I tear them out, cut them up, and “shake the bag.”
