Anatomy Lessons
Michael Brennan explores the interesting world of anatomy-focused art.
The closest I ever came to anatomy lessons was three years of life drawing classes at art school. Friday afternoons were spent with a group of other late-teens to early-twenties standing at easels that encircled a naked person, trying to make their foreshortened torso look in proportion to their extended limbs, or not pay too much undue attention to bits of the body that are typically less openly on display.
Starting this degree as a seventeen-year-old, the first few awkward weeks became even more strange when students from our class started taking up the role of life model in order to make some cash.
But that was before mobile phones and MMS, let alone OnlyFans.
Jordyn Burnett’s Instagram account and website invite people to share their nudes for her creative fodder. Credited
or anonymous, Burnett proposes to repurpose these personal pics, fashioning them into digital illustrations and prints as part of a folio of work that uses a feminist lens to champion body positivity, elevate nuanced and fluid identities, celebrate diversity of gender and sexuality, and normalise emotional and mental vulnerability.
She pushes back against the social and political structures that try to tell us how things should be and does so with equal parts humour and brutal candour wrapped up in a palette of yellow, pink and green (and the rest of the colours in that song too). Her pictures of people’s bits – filter free – reveal physical foibles and bodily kinks, and by extension, the inner frailties that reside within us all.
Burnett is exhibiting a (safe for work-ish) selection of these digital prints at Noosa Regional Gallery alongside another expansive survey of work that similarly dissects (and reassembles) the body in a way that exposes ideas of identity, mortality and mental health.
Outwardly more macabre than Burnett’s work, One + One = Three: Natalie Ryan, Pip Ryan and The Ryan Sisters plays with death, horror, the unhinged, the gruesome and even the occult. But ‘play’ is the operative word here. While a river of darkness streams through the works of the Ryan Sisters – both individually and when working in collaboration – it’s floated down with the fun of an inflatable pink flamingo.
Whether it’s a contorted and stretched bodily amalgam of Natalie’s torso and Pip’s legs; a gold-horned goat named Phillip that stares at you with eyes that tell you he’s about to say something you’re going to want to hear; or a delicate watercolour depiction of a floating, horned, fleshy mass with 30 breasts (yes, I counted them), the morose and the funny wrap around one another in Natalie and Pip’s work and disarm some very deep subjects with whimsy and wit.
The thing about these exhibitions is that they approach the body with levity and jest while preserving a respect for the human, animal and hybrid beings that they turn their attention to. In maintaining this reverential regard, a safe space for sharing usually veiled quirks and fragilities is opened and offered.
WHAT’S ON
One + One = Three: Natalie Ryan, Pip Ryan and The Ryan Sisters
Jordyn Burnett: a glow from below
10 September to 30 October, Noosa Regional Gallery
Riverside, 9 Pelican Street, Tewantin
