loading...
  • Leesa Streifler

    Leesa Streifler

  • Leesa Streifler

    Leesa Streifler

  • Leesa Streifler

    Leesa Streifler

  • Leesa Streifler

    Leesa Streifler

  • Leesa Streifler

    Leesa Streifler

  • Leesa Streifler

    Leesa Streifler


NORMAL


Leesa Streifler (Winnipeg)


September 3 to October 4, 1998

The failure to achieve “normalcy” is normal. The common element in the one hundred and six photographs presented in the body of work entitled NORMAL is the repeated female figure. In the images, a transformation takes place that situates the female character in relation to the question of feminine identity. The transformation occurs through the interplay of pose and drawn intervention resulting in a range of responses to socially prescribed standards of normalcy. States of ambivalence, anger, terror, mockery, defiance and transcendence pose alternative models and form a new cast of characters who resist repressive notions of the feminine.

- Leesa Streifler

Despite the restorative political, legal and social changes to better women’s lives, contemporary notions of the feminine circulate in casual, insidiously effective ways. One has only to spend a couple of lunch hours flipping through fashion magazines at the newsstand to recognize the residual authority of these feminine “norm”. Leesa Streifler’s charged imagery exaggerates the unspoken expectations of how women look, walk, talk, sit, stand, dress, eat. By drawing and writing over black and white photographs of her own body, she offers a wry, and at times shocking antidote to society’s preoccupation with the feminine body.

By reducing her own image to a surface on which she presents a transgressive and incisive analysis, Leesa Streifler casts doubt on what we collectively recognize as feminine norms or standards. How can we define “normal”? What is meant by “the feminine”? What are the politics of decisions, action, speech, gesture, costume and pose? How can the nastiness of vernacular clichés of identity be turned inside out? How can one speak to expectations frequently unspoken, yet rigidly enforced?

The double entendre title of one of the works, Acts, underscores the multivalent allusions to theatre. As an installation and in the nature of Leesa Streifler’s process, Normal exudes an ambiguous yet potent theatricality. The ritualized nature of first posing for the camera, then adopting an alter-role of another persona and voice, parallels the theatrical apparatus: performed/spoken script; staging; relationship to the audience; as well as the relationship between framing and staging.

With an anxiety-ridden self-consciousness, Leesa Streifler’s photographs pose the contradictions between women’s desire to achieve the “feminine” and a defiance to perform as required. The images she has constructed are too extreme to convincingly take up any standard notion of femininity. In fact, their utter failure at normalcy tips them over the edge into the extraordinary, to defiantly celebrate deviation from the normal and to embody a lively and potent alternative to normalcy.

Leesa Streifler’s images detonate norms through an exaggerated visual sass.


Leesa Streifler received a B.F.A. (Honours) from the University of Manitoba and a M.F.A. from Hunter College in New York. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina where she has taught since 1986. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections and has been exhibited across the country and in the United States.

Normal has been curated by Vera Lemecha and organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery. The artist and the Dunlop Art Gallery would like to thank the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Canada Council for the Arts.




|