What a Woman 2.0
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.
What A Woman 2.0
My work 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 decades 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 – often of happiness, competence, or satisfaction, (although sometimes discontent or distress), 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, operating 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.