Dancing for Dummies at C’cap – Centre for Cultural and Artist Practices, Winnipeg reveals the artist’s fascination with the subjective nature of identity
Tragicomic desperation underscores Erica Eyres’s paintings, ceramic sculptures and single-channel videos. Though she studied in Glasgow and continues to live there 20 years later, Eyres was born and raised in Winnipeg and often bases her artwork on images and objects from ephemera related to her coming of age during the 1980s and 90s. Her exploration of how her selfhood was constructed, then, attains particular poignancy in this hometown presentation.
Vulnerable stares animate five forlorn oil portraits, some originating in ‘before’ images from a vintage beauty manual, others presenting awkward teen poses betraying the clichéd expressions of this transitional age. Based on a 1980s instructional handbook for troubled children, Elizabeth (all works 2023) concentrates pathos in its depictions of acne and oversize teeth, while On the Phone’s presentation of the eponymous adolescent preoccupation – here with corded phone – seems light-years removed from today’s nonstop digital connections. However, it is disconnection – the wistful reality-check that creates a shortfall between private desires and public ideals – that defines Eyres’s fascination with the subjective nature of identity.
To this end, glazed stoneware precisely represents everyday period items such as a signed Hallmark birthday card, an ashtray overflowing with lipstick-stained cigarettes and a bowl of leftover cereal. Well-thumbed books from the Sweet Valley High teen soap series (1994–98) – infamous for narratives of female rivalry and the pursuit of happiness – are creepily depicted. Also represented are books from the ‘For Dummies’ US media franchise, whose dumbed-down self-education manuals were wildly popular during the 1990s, and another reminder of a time when residual postwar euphoria and social mobility were being reversed by neoliberal state and corporate opportunism that flipped social welfare onto the individual. As implied by Eyres’s referencing of kinds of noninstitutional guidance for the young, the decline of civic confidence in 1980s and 90s North America was fertile ground for the hucksters of the human-potential movement and get-rich-quick schemes that entreated people to look better, be obedient, optimise production.
Eyres’s focus on this era, informed by the consumerist individualism it produced, sits in an authentically weird conceptual niche that integrates homage, irony and empathy while critiquing our current moment of mainstream self-optimisation. In parts autobiography, social observation and aesthetic fascination, the show culminates with the video Learning to Dance, a sendup of instructional videos in which Eyres plays all four female characters. Dance instructor Nicole narrates her story of self-empowerment through badly performed dance moves perfected in front of a mirror and whose life-changing qualities she gnomically exalts. As three hapless seminar participants struggle to shake off their own inhibitions and emulate her success, the results establish their own damaged psychological profiles. Informed by the semantics of self-help and the artist’s reading of Lacan for Beginners (1997), and chockful of passive aggression, Learn to Dance is a painfully hilarious performance that hijacks Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ theory of self-representation as a cultural probe for the hollow tropes of personal self-realisation.
But it is the cruel and absurd inadequacies created by psychologically savvy public relations campaigns of the period, in the video and throughout the show, that anchor these fictions. Eyres’s characters are defined by their obvious failure to conform to cultural ideals and consumerist optimisation, and it is from this very human gap that her work gathers its melodramatically affective impact.
Dancing for Dummies at C’cap – Centre for Cultural and Artist Practices, Winnipeg, 26 August – 8 October
