Focusing on the use of two stereotypical genres in photography, suburbia, and monstrosity New Zealand Art writer, visited Rice University Wednesday night to share his take on a fellow New Zealander’s work and her bizarre perception when behind or in front of a camera.

Anthony Byrt, a leading art writer, well known throughout Europe and the US, shared several photographs from New Zealand photographer, Yvonne Todd. Her mix of traditional horror characters was morphed into businessmen and housewives with a motive to kill. “There’s something, both economically inspirational and distinctly Freudian in Todd,” said Byrt, “the suburban daughter of an accountant.”

The first series Byrt shared was entitled, Wall of Man, taken in 2009. The sequence of photographs played an essential role in Todd’s career. Most of the figures in her photos, Byrt continued, “always look lonely, but connect through awkward smiles.”

These portraits were the kind that might be displayed in corporate offices, but for Todd, they were real people, people who responded to an ad in the paper who wanted to be involved in an art project. Her art project.

“They also signal a sort of radical and disruptive shift within her practice too,” Byrt went on, “most obviously they were, as the title expressed, ALL men, and it’s the first and so far only series that Todd has dedicated to the opposite sex.” Her other photographs contained only women as the subjects, making this series stand out when displayed alongside them in galleries.

The women she usually photographed were usually young, and her fascination with wigs and false teeth transformed them into her versions of Frankenstein. She is giving them more meaning outside of the art. Byrt continued to show slides from Wall of Man and Wall of Seahorsel, which contained her images of women sometimes faceless or standing in contorted poses that gave them a manikin likeness.

“With Wall of Man, she’d gone to the opposite end of the gender and age spectrums, not just guys but old guys. And it was, she told me”, said Byrt, ‘her least successful series, sales-wise.’ So collectors seemed far more comfortable with her creepy adolescent girls on their walls than successful doctors and retired CEOS. But as Todd says, ‘“I was more interested in the fact that corporate photography has to convey a sense of infallibility in paternal love. I wanted to see if I could replicate that using ordinary blocks from North shore.”’

̶  KMV ̶

 FACTS BOX

Lecture MC/Invited by- Rice Professor, John Sparagana

Anthony Byrt- Art Writer- Speaker

Yvonne Todd- www.ervon.com