Reception: Saturday, November 9, 2024 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Diana Thorneycroft: Sing Into My Mouth
Text by Kara Eckler
Winnipeg artist Diana Thorneycroft presents a new series of intuitive, irreverent, and whimsical drawings in her latest solo exhibition, Sing Into My Mouth. Best known for her humorous photography of dioramas she creates of popular Canadian themes, Thorneycroft’s drawings are quite different in execution, but they bring us her bold playful characters, ribald wit, and maximalist aesthetic.
Here we find a menagerie of circus freaks and performers, dunces, dancers, skateboarders, and hybrid beings interacting with each other in ways which touch on the nature of human relationships and embodiment. Devils, demigods, or astral entities, who knows? These half-human half-animal creatures have emerged from Thorneycroft’s subconscious through an unplanned intuitive process mysterious even to herself. They connect to each other through tubes, assaulting and exploring each other, probing orifices while their genitals are nonchalantly on display and erupt from places one would not expect. In Spitballing, the brainstorming tactic is illustrated literally, where one figure reaches into the stomach of the other, whose protruding jaw feeds her partner, presumably, balls of spit, an energy exchange with sexual allusions as well as a funny depiction of the nature of relating. Our bodies, which function as complex machines, are so familiar and yet so alien to us. There are many references in these drawings to bodies as tools, or bodies using tools such as: a hermaphroditic penis-vagina wand, flashlight arms, a penis-vacuum, and various prosthetics such as peg-legs. In Mother and Daughter, a plague doctor without pants and with a phallus tail uses someone unseen’s braids to climb a mountain while her daughter follows behind.
The imagery in Sing Into My Mouth calls to mind the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch and works of surrealists such as Leonor Fini. They also draw on the style of outsider art and folk art. Diminutive in scale but big in punch, these seemingly naive coloured pencil drawings speak to the inner child and the mischievous self, yet they are also full of skillful attention to detail, adult anxieties, adult desires, and adult problems. They could be illustrations from Grimm Tales in an alternate universe. These characters are alternately in hell, our human world, and purgatory, perhaps of their own making. It is noteworthy that no matter how grotesque, none of these figures are fully monstrous or devilish, they are all human hybrids. We have characters spanning multiple races, diverse genders, and multifarious sexual orientations. They reveal aspects of what make us human, what character traits belie our civilized natures, what secret intentions and fixations reveal themselves in the transformations going on with their bodies. The figures are sexual and unapologetic, they let it all hang out. They explore each other’s bodies, they intrude, grimace, gesture, penetrate, their phallus tongues loll, their phallus tails titillate. At times grotesque, this exhibition delivers deeply into experiences of body horror, body humour, and how our bodies are both sensual and ridiculous.
