tylerpayne

Works by Tyler Payne Installation Shot

Image credit Janelle Low (C) 2022

Vanitas (kim)

The male gaze continues its long career. Kim Kardashian, in all her ubiquity, has been accepted by one of the foremost fashion brands, Balenciaga, as an appropriate model
– status icon – to walk for their couture show in Paris. Simultaneously, Kardashian is
shrinking the curves that defined her, moving toward the ‘heroin chic’ that defined the fashion of the 90’s and in such figures as Kate Moss. This is nothing less than a cultural revolution, in my view, and apotheosis for this self-deifying figure. It a new high - water mark for the male gaze, which continues its long career – now online.

Tyler Payne 2022

(C) Tyler Payne 2022

Vanitas (Kim)

Digital Installation, (electro bri-collage animation, timber, vintage frame)

This work is a homage to Audrey Flack’s painting Marilyn (Vanitas) 1977 re-imagined as a digital animated installation with the contemporary beauty figure of our time Kim Kardashian.

Kardashian’s body – highly stylised and instantly recognisable – appears as a site of intense objectification in contemporary culture. It a form of objectification that suits commodification well. Perhaps more than any other celebrity today, her own celebrity seems fixed in a frozen form, like Medusa turned to stone.
Tyler Payne

#doitfortheafterselfie

Works by Tyler Payne, Installation view, Site 8 Gallery, RMIT University

Image credit Janelle Low © 2022

Fountain of Youth

© Tyler Payne 2021 Electro bri-collage animation

43 seconds

^{Keeping Time}
Keeping Time is a series of three electro-bri-collage animations that investigate how myth cycles are rife with stories designed to oppress women and their agency. These narratives often ‘legitimize male privilege by muting female authority.’ Kim Kardashian is the muse of these animations. After bursting into notoriety and fame in 2007 with a sex-tape, Kardashian has built a billion dollar empire. My work is preoccupied with the fact that the invention of social media has allowed for new intensities of commodification and the intrusion of capitalist commodification into more intimate forms of life than ever before (the commodification of communication via emojis for example). In terms of a ‘capitalist’ who has mastered accumulation through these new commodity forms, Kim Kardashian is, in my view, exemplary. The animations are littered with visual examples of her beauty empire. The project of the Kardashian body is an attempt to satisfy the symbolic demands of the male gaze in the real. Kardashian has, in a way, cosmetically enhanced and shaped her body to become a surrealist object itself, a superimposition of the ideal and the real.

Aesthetics (In Front of the Mirror)

After Władysław Czachórsk

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 23cm x 36cm

Garden of KKW alludes to the Garden of Eden myth in Christian mythology, elaborating on the suggestion of religious sentiment found in Kim Kardashian-West’s advertising and public announcements. This garden, an animated collage, is populated with commodities from Kardashian-West’s brand, including ‘Kimojis’, saleable digital icons that commodify communication (‘#BLESSED’). This continues Kardashian-West’s commodification of everyday life in digital communities.

The theme of corruption in the Eden myth stands ironically beside Kardashian-West’s own corruption of religious symbols for commercial ends (what is called ‘simony’). Kardashian-West’s beatific turn, like Kanye West’s recent ‘Sunday Services’, suggests self-deification, trading on the contemporary cultural association between celebrity and deity.

KIMUSA

© Tyler Payne 2021 Electro bri-collage animation

1 minute & 18 seconds

Garden of KKW

© Tyler Payne 2020 Electro bri-collage animation

21 seconds

Aesthetics

The Image Looks Backs

RMIT Gallery 2020

Aesthetics + Keeping Time + #doitfortheafterselfie

Aesthetics (In Front of the Mirror)

After Władysław Czachórsk

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 23cm x 36cm

What are the moral consequences of women engaging in self-portraiture today?
Tyler Payne

Aesthetics (Woman in the Mirror)

After Paul Delvaux

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 36cm x 23cm

Garden of KKW

© Tyler Payne 2020 Electro bri-collage animation

21 seconds (excerpt clip)

Aesthetics examines the quote by the late art critic John Berger, reflecting on the role of the male gaze in the history of constructions of aesthetic value in Western art:

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity’, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

Aesthetics engages with this deeply-rooted tradition in Western artmaking by appropriating diverse male artists’ contributions to the genre of the female nude. The outcome of this tradition has been to cement women’s role as the self-conscious sex, and to assert male artists’ dominance as controller of cultural representation’s of women’s bodies. Aesthetics engages this tradition in the contemporary moment. Is the new popularity of the selfie, and social media, indicative of an intensifying culture of vanity

Into the mirror of this tradition, Kim Kardashian gazes back. There is every reason to suspect she is the personification of the vice of ‘vanity’ in the contemporary moment. Kardashian has raised self-consciousness to the level of a life’s vocation.

What are the moral consequences of women engaging in self-portraiture today?

Aesthetics (Rokeby Venus)

After Diego Velázquez

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 36cm x 23cm

It took three days to download videos of Kim Kardashian to match with paintings by men depicting vanity (a woman and reflection). Aesthetics is made up of moving images, iPads and custom built antique frames.
Tyler Payne

Aesthetics (Venus at the Mirror)

After Peter Paul Rubens

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 23cm x 36cm

Aesthetics (Woman at a Mirror)

After Theo van Rysellberghe

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 36cm x 23cm

Aesthetics (Vanity)

After Gustave Léonnard de Jonghe

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 23cm x 36cm

Aesthetics (Fortune Teller Svetlana)

After K.Brullov

© Tyler Payne 2020

iPad, moving image and timber 23cm x 36cm

KIMSPO

HISTRIONIC Exhibition at Counihan Gallery Install

Shot by Janelle Low

Exhibition by Tyler Payne, Saffron Newey and Marion Abraham

KIMSPO 2019

Moving Collage Installation

iPads, Perspex, Marine Wire

© Tyler Payne

#kimspo

Me chatting about my work at PERFECTION in Dublin at Science Gallery :-)

KIMSPO

© Tyler Payne 2019

Moving Collage, iPads, Perspex, Marine Wire

Installation View, Tinning St Gallery, Melbourne

KIMSPO moving collage installation
The interface of Instagram encourages a false analogy between the life of the celebrity and the everyday life, a comic likeness between the sacred and the profane. The inevitable failures articulate class differences, insofar as the non-celebrity bodies of everyday consumers enjoy none of the economic freedom (time) of social media celebrities. KIMSPO doesn’t act like a direct critique. The work is collated picturesque landscapes with high end sponsored posts. The collages are compiled from various accounts related to #fitspiration. The silhouetted bodies are a disguised mixture of Kardashian figures and #fitspiration influencers. Their retouched bodies undetectably in difference. The video pieces were designed to fit the screens that the collated imagery was originally intended for: tablets and smartphones. In installation the KIMSPO series has iPads suspended in the air and clustered to represent the panoptic presence of the unattainable bodies and product placement of #fitspiration.

I put down the camera, and picked up the photograph
- Tyler Payne

KIMSPO #flash

© Tyler Payne 2019

GIF

KIMSPO

© Tyler Payne 2019

GIF

KIMSPO #tropics

© Tyler Payne 2019

GIF

At the centre of #fitspiration advertising products is the idol-like form of Kim Kardashian. Everyday women consume #fitspo products with this idol-like form in mind. But the fetish-like presentation distracts from an important reality: the rigorous disciplines required to produce that body, the labour-time expended in the mastery of capacities. The Kardashian-body is a ‘full-time’ role.

KIMSPO (#doitfortheafterphoto),

© Tyler Payne 2018

digital collage, GIF

Kardashian’s body is both idolised and consumed through social media. She is a fetish object alongside the products she sells, or, more pointedly, she is the product. Her flat tummy, her shapely waist represent the value of the commodity from which she has become indistinguishable.

KIMSPO #luxe

© Tyler Payne 2019

GIF

KIMSPO (#bambi)

© Tyler Payne 2018

digital collage, GIF

KIMSPO (#bikinibod),

© Tyler Payne 2018

digital collage, GIF

KIMSPO (#detox)

© Tyler Payne 2018

digital collage, GIF

Kimspired

Kimspired (demonstration purposes only)

Photographic Inkjet Print, 841 x 1189mm, 2018

© Tyler Payne 2018

Kimspired Installation Shot

Kimspired

Photographic Inkjet Print, 841 x 1189mm, 2018

© Tyler Payne 2018

Kimspired

Photographic Inkjet Print, 841 x 1189mm, 2018

(C) Tyler Payne 2018

“Payne’s Womanhours demonstrates the oppression of Instagram. In a series of videos, the artist employs her own body to reveal the level of self-correction needed to achieve the perfect self-portrait. She appears to endure an extreme physical and psychological makeover through female cosmetic rituals such as waxing, tanning, bleaching, plucking and shaving. The perfected self is captured for a fleeting moment in the virtual realm and the ritual is repeated all over again.”
The Conversation
Source: theconversation.com

#woman
hours

Womanhours

PERFECTION 2018

A strategy is to return the gaze, to say, ‘I see you seeing me.’ This is an act of defiance.
Tyler Payne

The cosmetic rituals I explore are decided upon purposefully. I was fifteen-years-old when I was told by my friends that my boyfriend would expect my vagina to be ‘clean’ and free of hair. And so, for many years, I dutifully waxed my vagina, despite the discomfort, the first degree burns and bruising I had experienced from different waxers. For years I was convinced I looked my best with fake tan smeared across my body, ashamed of my white legs. Over time many friends and colleagues have discussed with me certain cosmetic rituals – body-correcting practices – that they underwent for the same reasons I had, and I began to develop this research as a way to express comradery with these women.

Brazilian Wax
The Brazilian wax has become an everyday grooming practice for many younger women, and an expectation from many male partners in heterosexual relationships. The image of a waxed vagina is widely disseminated, whether in something like bathing suit commercials for teenagers, or hard core pornography, and has become the norm. In fact, that expectation has morphed into disgust or derision toward women who fail to depilate their pubic mound. But the pain involved in waxing is suppressed in advertisements for waxing and ignored or not discussed by men for whom a bald vagina is expected. Entry into sexual adulthood, for women, is now gated by a painful ritual, and the natural female body, before the wax, is an object of sexual exclusion. The fetishizing of the bald vagina is both a kind of sexual objectification and an attempt to transform women’s pain into men’s pleasure. To foreground the pain of the wax, by showing the suffering on the woman’s face as she is being waxed, is also to foreground the humanness of women who undergo waxing, it is to challenge the sexual objectification that the Brazilian wax entails. The tight framing on the face resists the urge for the male gaze to objectify by focusing on the de-personalised body part (the bald vagina).

SPANK
Skinnyfat (2016) and SPANK (2016) interrogate the effects of Photoshop’s infamous ‘airbrushing’ and ‘liquefying’ tools, used to slim women’s bodies and liquidate skin blemishes, on society’s perception of what a ‘normal’ female body looks like. These tools are often used to edit models’ bodies to appear artificially slim, and yet the image is often perceived as ‘natural’ by consumers. The gap between the unreality of the ‘Glossy Magazine Girl’ and many women’s own bodily reality is experienced as shameful. It is possible to see this editing tool as a way of preoccupying women with their flaws in their body, and tying their time and their identity to their bodies. My work challenges this by showing the two images of my own body, with and without the editing tools, side by side. The artificialness of the editing techniques is highlighted. If part of the power of this image over women is its ability to ‘naturalise’ the Glossy Magazine Girl, my aim is to de-naturalise it. I place my own body under the scrutinizing gaze of the lens and stare back, in the hope of undermining the gaze’s power.

Salt Water Cleanse (Woman Hours)

© Tyler Payne 2016

DSLR video, 10:26

The Body + The Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach.

"The Body + the Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach" was a creative practice research project that investigated the relationship of (white) women’s embodiment to the lens of gendered advertising. To focus the research, a recently mainstreamed group of female cosmetic rituals were chosen — body-contour wear (SPANX), Brazilian waxing, salt-water cleansing, and fake tanning. The intent of the research was to interrogate the relationship between these body-correcting practices and the idealized image of the "Glossy Magazine Girl" — i.e. preternaturally thin, hairless, and unblemished by shades darker than pink — which now appear with more frequency in women’s everyday life, and have reconfigured the social construction of female gender. The (artistic-research) response to the subject matter was a series of video and photographic works in the genre of self-portraiture. These works attempted to critique the new norms of embodiment emerging through these practices through the researcher’s parodic undergoing of the cosmetic rituals themselves. This "carnal" methodology, following from the methodology of Louis Wacquant, is one that embodies the researcher in the social practices being researched, i.e. body-correcting practices. This method produced research results — embodied and affective — not available to purely observational research, which should interest the artistic research community and feminism generally. The images and videos de-fetishize and denaturalize the embodied product of the cosmetic rituals. My studio-led research reveals the intractable, comic "failures" in the face of the demands placed on the everyday performance of women’s gender. By doing so, it turns these failures to affirmation, as well as critique of the gender norm these practices construct.

SPANK Billboard Installation, 2016

420cm x 220cm – banner material, skybond, timber.

Womanhours, 2016
How many hours does it take to be a woman? This studio-led research project looks at contemporary cosmetic rituals that are changing the way women experience their bodies. Advertising’s ‘Glossy Magazine Girl’: plucked, waxed, purged and bleached, has come between a woman and her body. Though women’s bodies that have passed through these cosmetic rituals are seen everywhere they are not witnessed labouring to produce this effect. What is seen instead is a singular and controlled perspective, a magical product naturalized by the advertisement’s frame. The effects on the female body are detached from the struggle that created them, and so are made to seem entirely effortless. Women’s bodies are thus more easily fetishized, and the advertising lens has become a powerful tool of bodily control.

The aim of the Womanhours project is to turn the power of the lens against itself so that the tasks of plucking, waxing, purging and bleaching, usually hidden from view are presented for all to see. The labour processes of such ‘improvements’ are documented so that their effects on the female body are de-fetishized. The research reveals the intractable – and comic – ‘failures’ in the face of the demands placed on the everyday performance of female gender. Such failures, however, become productive and self-affirming because they de-naturalize the image of the Glossy Magazine Girl and reveal the artifice involved in her appearance.

The artworks for this project are self-portraits: the artist undergoing the cosmetic rituals herself in ways that are informed by Louis Wacquant’s methodology of ‘carnal sociology’ where the researcher becomes an agent in the social action being studied, rather than simply observing actions as they take place. The emotional responses of the participant researcher are not excluded from the findings – indeed they are foregrounded. The intention to critique informs this carnal form of research, not just through observation, but also through embodied knowledge. I have also aimed to convey a deliberate sense of vulnerability in these artworks by emphasizing my susceptibility to the demands these rituals make on my own body. In Womanhours, this personal engagement aims to establish solidarity with other women who feel obliged to undergo these rituals.

Early testing of Womanhours

Untitled (Body), 2012

Photographic Inkjet Print - 60cm x 90cm

W is for Women, 2012

Photographic Inkjet Print - 60cm x 90cm

#WisforWoman

Carnal sociology gave me the opportunity to immerse myself into the research as a full participant. I was not able to avoid the emotional and affective responses of the research. And although I continue to feel uncomfortable, this ‘body knowledge’ has made me more determined to reject any more shame.
Tyler Payne

Dirty Feminist

Dirty Feminist was an art collaboration by Tyler Payne and Vanessa Howells that was active from 2012 - 2017. The focus of DIRTY FEMINIST was to explore contemporary attitudes to female sexuality. They played with pixel usage to interrogate censorship culture and female beauty standards.