Monday, July 26, 2010
Story by Tony Martins
I’m often compelled by art that mixes beauty with a slightly disturbing darkness—which is precisely why Karina Kraenzle has long been one of my local favorites. Her manipulated photos are a deliberate re-casting of the inherent beauty in an image, a re-casting that is at once freeing, deepening, and a little bit freaky.
Such dreadfully good darkness looms once again in Kraenzle’s latest exhibition, Déjà vu, opening Thursday, July 29 at Exposure Gallery (above Thyme & Again at 1255 Wellington West). The show includes two series of works that use found magazine images to question and reinvent feminine beauty.
“I have an impulse to take commodified beauty and subvert it to create an alternative,” explains Kraenzle, although she sees no need to explain her “instinctual” taste for darker themes and moods.
“I’d need a shrink to anaylze that,” she added with a laugh. “When I look at other work, that’s what I’m looking for, too.”
The first and most fully resolved series in the Exposure show, also called Déjà Vu, is an inventive destruction of magazine advertisements. By crinkling, arranging, and scanning the removed pages (without closing the scanner lid), Kraenzle creates an entirely different species of sculptured women—women much sadder and darker and somehow realer—than the idealized beauties found in the glossy mags.
For Kraenzle, the look of a black-background renaissance painting is one of the pleasantly unintended outcomes of the method. “I’m going to push that more for future works,” she said.
The second series in the show, called Beauty Marks, is a work-in-progress offering a more political take on the generic beauty found in magazine advertising.
“It’s also a comment on the vulnerability of women,” said Kraenzle. “It’s a little bit of an act of violence,” she added, noting how such disfigurement somewhat mirrors the original manipulation found in the ads themselves.
Kraenzle summarized in her artist statement: “My goal, ultimately, is to refocus the gaze on the undeniable relentlessness—and more questionable banality—of the ‘female’ image in advertising.”
Déjà Vu opens with a vernissage, Thursday, July 29th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
