What a Woman by Tara Leach

Bio:

Tara Leach (she/her) is an artist and teacher who lives, works and creates on Treaty 2 Territory in Brandon, MB. She was born in Swan River, grew up in Dauphin, and studied at Brandon University, McMaster University and University of Manitoba. In private, Tara has put brush to canvas and eye to camera for decades as a way to make sense of her world and experiences but began publicly exhibiting her art in 2011. She teaches visual art at Ecole secondaire Neelin High school, where she has been encouraging teenagers to find their creative voices for over 20 years. She is captivated by nature, theatre, knick knacks, stories, and she looks forward to becoming a kindly crone. 

Artist Statement:

This body of work, entitled What A Woman, questions the assumptions underpinning the lives of women and girls and is characterized by nostalgia, personal mythology, humour, and resentment.

Through acrylic portraits referencing family snapshots, mixed media collages combining vintage magazine images with expressive mark making, and compositions that remix these forms and processes, my work depicts my grandmothers, my mothers, myself and my daughter engaged in the work of forging identities and world views from a chaotic barrage of information and expectations. My work situates us as real, individual women among versions or prototypes of womanhood proposed within the broader context of cultural and metaphorical symbols, including advertising text fragments and circles

Painting family photos and advertising art from years (most notably the 1950s/60s, 1980s, and 2010s and present day) significant to the women in my matriarchal lines allows me to temporarily overcome the linear nature of time. I can access an instant that, without the photograph would have been swiftly forgotten, or survived, at best, as an ever dimming impression. I can stretch time, spending hours and days inside a millisecond, carefully observing, reconsidering, recombining, reforming and re-contextualizing details according to my feelings and to what makes some sense to me. I can take (guilty) pleasure in the surfaces I render, luxuriating in patterns, textiles, fonts and textures. 

Each snapshot and ad image I work with depicts a performance - most often of happiness, competence, or satisfaction in the context of one’s own culture and time. As I work, I have very mixed feelings; I am fiercely proud of these women when they appear to be nailing perfect performances of the version of femininity dictated by their time, and I am distressed by the knowledge that these ideals are unsustainable, designed to keep women locked in an oppressive cycle of striving, and distractions from the true task of living a meaningful life on one’s own terms. 

I am also interested in the varying number of layers that separate the viewer from the actual women behind each image and what that signifies as I combine actual 35mm photo prints, painting of 35mm and digital photos, digital photos of sections of collages, and candid, simulated candid and posed snapshots. I am curious about the way the various picture taking technologies determine what is emphasized and selected and how playing with these steps and technologies can start to make these images and compositions into something strange or silly, replacing their serious instructive power with laughter and imagination.

Because a truly perfect circle is impossible to craft by an artist or anyone, my preoccupation with painting them parallels the futile pursuit of flawless surfaces and manic optimism displayed to varying degrees by the women in my snapshots and ad images. Additionally, the quality of being a shape which can be precisely formed metaphysically but only ever roughly approximated physically allows the circles I paint to reveal my own search for that which is clear, comprehensible and transcendent in life and simultaneously, to admit that, even in the impressions I cherish and preserve in paint, much remains obscure, incomprehensible and mundane.