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| Jeanette Doyle: with the women of the Star project from Portrayals – drawings and collages, mixed media |
At Broadstone Gallery and in Ballymun’s Axis two distinct aspects of Jeanette Doyle’s work were recently shown. The two exhibitions overlapped and in this way her themes of identification with others and the difficulties of occupying social space were articulated into divergent directions.
In Broadstone a combination of painting, drawing and watercolour comprises the enigmatically titled and then I place my face against the glass. This work demands that the viewer makes a journey from the private reverie of Doyle’s notebooks to the documented re-enactment of celebrity-star stalkers in NYC by way of the St.Patrick’s Day parade.
Doyle’s paintings narrate the progress of the artist as she makes her way through the streets of New York. In the catalogue essay, A case of mistaken identity, Rebecca Gordon Nesbit elaborates upon the suggestion of narrative implied in these works by composing a short story of three imagined characters she finds pictured in Doyle’s paintings. The story culminates in the coincidental meeting of a model, an art lover and a cheerleader at the junction of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.
Movement between image and text provides the structure for Doyle’s process. The painted image of the anorak-clad, sunglass-wearing figure who inhabits each of the Gawker stalker paintings finds its location in the picture dictated according to reports of previous celebrity sightings (posted on the stalker section of www.gawker.com). Each work is a seamlessly omposed amalgam of printed photo documentation complete with textual commentary onto which the Gawker character herself is rendered using oil paint.
Jeanette Doyle with the women of the Star project is an exhibition of three separate serial works made in a collaborative spirit involving video, collage and painting. Commissioned by Breaking Ground 2, Doyle was encouraged to focus on issues confronting people from Ballymun. The installation of works that results is a synthesis of the group concerns and Doyle’s practice.
The municipal stalking of the glamorous at Broadstone takes on a different complexion in Ballymun. The movement now is between the real life of appearances of individuals who have experienced social marginalisation and their negotiation of the possibilities of self-affirmation offered by a more glamorous physical appearance. In Portrayals, moments recorded at the project meetings are revisited. In the five-monitor video work the camera cuts away from the faces as hands cut away at images from lifestyle magazines. Smart clothes are selected and tried on; alongside presentations being delivered, someone struggles with a boot as another pastes an image to a scrapbook. The language of clothing and appearances provides a point of discourse within which self-image is established through photography and collage.
In Doyle’s anonymously titled Portraits series her collaborators assume confident poses. A series of identically scaled, small paintings picture the women of the Star project. Set within an improvised photo shoot, the Star women take a stand. In these neutral scenes, side-lit and complete with photo backdrop, only occasionally a single chair acts as a prop. The paint applied amplifies the vague glossiness of the digitized subject, the saturation of colour effecting halo-like highlights along the Star women’s profiles.
These carefully negotiated images represent a precise corollary to the motivation of invasive scrutiny suggested by paparazzi-style photography, the subject so relentlessly rehearsed by Doyle in her Gawker stalker series. Indeed it could seem that the Ballymun Portraits were conceived of as a direct riposte to the utterly pre-determined identification of others according to name, place, date and time. In Ballymun no such determinations of the subject’s location or specific identity is ever asserted.
Meanwhile back at Broadstone the St Patrick’s Day parade is in full swing. Doyle’s use of watercolour, in its dissolution of manipulated digital photographs taken in New York in 2005, suggests an ironic stance regarding the performance of assumed identity signified by the parade. In this context the stained, misty-hued images achieved are sharply undercut by a parallel textual commentary exposing various obsessive-voyeuristic musings from the gawker.com postings. The detachment implicit in such a sly visual strategy recalls models of practice common to the work of American artists such as Richard Prince or John Baldessari.
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| Jeanette Doyle: from Four notebooks red/black/blue/green |
The catalogue, which accompanies both exhibitions, documents both aspects of Doyle’s current work, but in its design and content it draws a clear distinction between the implications of the two approaches. An essay by Mick Wilson establishes, in some anecdotal detail, the context of Doyle’s participation with this Breaking Ground project, whereas by contrast Rebecca Gordon Nesbit’s contribution is essentially a subjective flight of fantasy: her prose is specifically inspired only according to the visual images provided in Doyle’s notebooks and paintings. This disjunction between the more public and private artistic roles is also materialized unambiguously in the design of the publication, which arranges the two projects in opposition; both projects are set upside-down and back to the front of one other.
Doyle has demonstrated in a brilliant fashion her ability to extend her practice in the public realm whilst compromising little.
Mark O'Kelly is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art at the Limerick School of Art and Design.
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