Janieta Eyre

Eyre was born in 1971 in London, England. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1988 and studied Magazine Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University before starting part-time studies in photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design.[4] In 1995 she took up photography professionally, at the age of 27.[7][1]

Her visual practice began in high school when Janieta, from a combination of depression and shyness, stopped speaking. She learned that by being silent, you become invisible. She gradually recovered her speech, but never lost her feeling for being an unseen observer.[8]

She began her creative career as a writer and claims that if she had remained in Britain, she would have continued as a poet or a novelist. In a North American culture dominated by film and television, she could make a greater impact with images.[9]

Eyre's photographs converge on performance, photography, and digital media. Her works have been compared to the experiments of early feminist photographers such as Claude Cahun, Madame Yevonde,[10] Cindy Sherman[11] and Francesca Woodman,[9] as well as the contemporary artists Mariko Mori and Matthew Barney.[10]

Eyre photographs in a faux-documentary style that is reminiscent of the earliest photographic artists from the middle years of the 19th century[12] due to a fascination with spirit photography.[9] She sets up meticulously detailed scenes, painting and furnishing rooms in her apartment.[7] Her works are elaborately staged and composed and dramatically cryptic.[13][9] She does not try to pass off her staged as reality, in the way 19th-century photographers did. She deliberately reveals the artificiality of her subjects[14] through a collage of costumes and objects in which all symbols become abstraction[11] in intentionally provocative and pointedly surreal works.[15] Eyre's photographs, full of private charms, magical emblems and eccentric rituals,[9] also recall early symbolism, from crosses to alchemy to numerology.[16] Her photographs are strong on narrative content and rich in atmosphere[7] and are an examination of how looking constructs identity.[13] Vividly bright colours and flattened, painterly patterned spaces provide the backdrop[11] in familiar, childlike, colourful environments to draw us into her fantastic world where the private is unveiled.[10]

Eyre transforms herself into a variety of characters[7] and uses double-exposure photography to create a surreal twin for herself.[12] She is best known for her doubles or doppelgangers which were initially made by masking off her camera lens and double-exposing the negative and later employed digital manipulation to the same effect.[9] In doing so Eyre disguises her own visage as well as her narratives.[13] Though claiming to only use herself as a model out of convenience, her self-portraits are widely self-examining and probe questions of identity.[7] Janieta Eyre's photographic self-as-monster portraits of Siamese twins, amputations and sideshow “pinheads"[17] are very much about public persona and social acceptance.[18] The practice of twinning fostered the myth that the second entity is actually her dead sister. The myth is not confirmed to be entirely true nor untrue.[12] Allegedly during the delivery, shortly after Janieta was born, there was an afterbirth that passed from her mother's womb that Eyre has always felt to be a dead twin.[2] The artist has also claimed that she was a Siamese twin at birth, with her sister dying during a 43-hour surgery that separated them.[19] Eyre draws inspiration from the idea of having past lives; in having “two images of myself.”[7] She says the twin in art shows us that the self as we imagine it is not a separate, unique entity but that we only really exists in relationship to others.[8]

Eyre draws inspiration from what is unseen, and images from her dreams.[9] She describes her work as involving the accumulation of impossible memories in an increasingly deliberate and meticulous documenting of an unreality. While discarding her everyday life, she instead documents an invisible one and constructs an autobiography that depends less on truth than possibility.[19] In exploring these issues of self-identity, Eyre takes a wholly intuitive approach to art-making[20] and thinks of her photographs as automatisms. She thinks of her art as a healing process that can be used as we become increasingly alienated from our bodies and selves through advanced technology. She hopes that through her personal art she can become more connected. Janieta is more interested in exploring inner lives[20] and thinks of her photographic practice as a sort of meditation.[8]

Eyre's first film, the 13-minute short Now We Understand Each Other is based on part of a short story that Eyre wrote when she was seventeen about an older woman who believes that two dolls are her children, and a play she wrote in her thirties about family violence. The main character, played by veteran actor Kate Trotter, converses with twin dolls she believes are her daughters, recounting past loves and infidelities. Hans Bellmer’s grotesquely reconfigured dolls were the biggest influence on her story and Eyre commissioned artist Jason McClennen to make dolls that looked as realistic as possible, based on the likeness of her own daughter.[2] The film speaks to the accidents and contingencies of the past that define the person that one becomes, in leaving traces of other, possible, unrealized lives.[9] The darker aspects of motherhood are further explored in the film, notably the idea of a mother bearing children she doesn't like.[2]

Letters from Home, directed by Mike Hoolboom, premiered in the Toronto International Film Festival, 1996

Scum, part of House of Pain, directed by Mike Hoolboom, premiered in the Toronto International Film Festival, 1995[4]

Musee D’Art Contemporain, Montreal

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

The National Gallery of Art, Reykjavik, Iceland

Ciudad de Cultura, Fundacion Municipal, Salamanca, Spain

Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa

Bailey & Company, Inc., Toronto

Shadow Play, Toronto

Microsoft, Seattle, Washington

The Seymour Collection, Vancouver, British Columbia

Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario

Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida

Hart House, University of Toronto

Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa[3][4]

Incarnations The Photography of Janieta Eyre. Coach House Books. 2017. ISBN 9781552453575.