In her earlier work, Van Lamsweerde took the clichéd eroticism of pin-up and advertising photography to task. Her exploration of female ideals in the media advanced further this year during a working period in New York, resulting in the Thank You Thighmaster series. These digitally manipulated photographs of Pam, Joan, Kim, and Britt do not show natural female bodies but rather sexless, grotesque figures. They resemble the ‘cyborgs’ that American science theorist Donna Haraway writes about in her science fiction-inspired Cyborg Manifesto: hybrid beings composed of human, physical, and technological components.
If you compare traditional photomontage with plastic surgery, which always leaves visible stitches, then the way Van Lamsweerde manipulates the photograph on the computer, down to the smallest pixel, resembles biotechnological interventions in genetic material. The result is so thoroughly manipulated that it no longer feels like something composed or assembled.
With grid patterns against a monochrome background, the paintings of Tim Ayres closely align with the 20th-century tradition of geometric abstract painting. In her essay Grids, Rosalind Krauss described the grid as emblematic of modernist painting: "[...] the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse." The grid emphasizes the autonomous, anti-mimetic nature of modern art: quiet, empty, geometric, and pure. Ayres' grids, however, are of an entirely different order. They are rich in poetic, scientific, and personal meanings. Their origin lies in emotional and physical experiences or in the information we receive from the media about technological research. Other paintings feature words that were accidentally overheard on the street or picked up from a song lyric. Phrases that, ripped from their original context, become ambiguous. Solidified emotions, like the manic grin on the faces of the girls photographed by Van Lamsweerde.
translated from an introductory text by Leontine Coelewij
