BOLD AND VIBRANT
Corinne Duchesne tackles the conversation around sex and identity
How can a woman deal frankly with questions of sex and identity in the #MeToo era? Corinne Duchesne’s recent body of work offers some answers.
“I’ll Show You Mine,” her exhibition at You Me Gallery, is funny, thoughtful and provocative.
Duchesne, 57, a local artist, is a professor of drawing at Sheridan College. She has been exhibiting since 1985 and has never shied away from an in-your-face approach to getting her ideas across.
Her style is bold, vibrant and linear. Her narratives have always been filled with images that crowd, collide and dart about on paper and Mylar surfaces.
In this exhibition she appropriates sexual images found in popular culture.
“Specifically, my work talks about the confusion I felt as a young person, not just a female, on my journey of self-discovery during the ’70s,” she tells me. “It was an era of change, ripe with awakening, as evidenced by the burgeoning acceptance of sexual innuendo, double meanings, and power struggles of the time.
“Today I am creating work about stories, how we hear them, and how they contribute to our sense of self. This work is both a reaction to and a questioning of the conversation of contemporary culture surrounding sex and identity.”
Duchesne’s complex, vividly coloured collage compositions are visually stunning. She arranges her drawn and printed cutouts in layers onto a paper surface. Some of the cutouts come from earlier pieces.
“I have been cutting apart my older Mylar drawings, from my Grief series,” she says. “These works talked about sadness and loss. By isolating segments of colour, shape and pattern, I recycle pieces into these new works, which are celebrations of joy and curiosity.”
Stylistically, the motifs — doughnuts, penises, vaginas, breasts, Barbie-like body parts, Thumper the rabbit and Mighty Mouse — recall the kind of illustrations found in adult comic books. The sexual references are the wink-wink nudgenudge type.
“By using humour, in a playful way, the work is meant to get you thinking and talking about what your path was to your own identity, and maybe see others in a more compassionate way,” Duchesne explains.
Titles are steamy. In “Fun Bags,” a pair of clown heads, one surprised, the other laughing, float near an arched red shape with knobs. A pair of arms flank the heads. The hands come together above the heads and create a place for a goat’s head to rest on.
Goats are everywhere. In Greek mythology, the goat was associated with two gods. One was Pan, a human-goat hybrid. The other was Zeus, the archetypal rapist.
“It’s good to be reminded that we are animals, and to love the fact,” she says. “We are rarely brought up, especially as women, to celebrate that part of ourselves. We are taught to suppress it. By contrast, our society has always been encouraged to forgive and even encourage the beast in men.”
“Sticky and Sweet” gives us a pair of white-gloved hands like Mickey Mouse’s embracing a seminude female torso and legs kneeling on an oversize doughnut with sprinkles. Some of the gloved fingers are red. A goat head grins on the right and three more doughnuts float in the background.
I wondered how this body of work relates to the #MeToo movement.
“One of the things that the #MeToo movement has shown us is that sharing personal experiences can promote conversations that can lead to change,” she says. “Education and the right to assert our own identity are the keys to empowerment.
“Taking away the taboo, the stigma, the wrongness, and instead becoming transparent and looking at sex as natural, healthy and good, not just bad behaviour, helps men and women view each other with respect and as equals.”