Girls’ world

Toronto artist Fiona Smyth conjures
up a fantastic realm of distaff distress

GYNO-CENTRIC: A work from The Wilding

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

You don’t have to be a Torontonian to know the work of visual artist Fiona Smyth, though her funky murals are certainly familiar to foot traffic there. For years now, her Cheez comic strips, which evolved into more abstracted illustrations over time, have graced the free monthly national art mag Exclaim!, while her Fazooza strips for Vice, her Nocturnal Emissions comic books and a host of illustration gigs have spread her bold, engaging style of gyno-centric pop surrealism far and wide. Her work is feminist, not in the polemical sense but rather reflective, toying with junk-culture iconography and esoteric symbolism.

The show of works on paper Smyth is presenting in Montreal is called The Wilding, the third stage of what’s becoming a sprawling, epic fantasy sci-fi narrative, an allegory for the pressures on women from without and within. Works from the first two stages, Chimera’s Daughters and The Virtuous, are included.

PRESSURE VALVE:
Smyth self-portrait

“It’s about survival,” Smyth explains, “external influences and internal ones, the environmental things that are affecting us today, and so much emotional stuff. On the environmental end, consuming GMOs, we don’t know how that’s going to affect us, and cosmetic surgery, how that’s epidemic at this point. At least in the media, we see it so much—changing women’s bodies—changing humans’ bodies, but my focus is on women.”

The transhumanism and apocalyptic anxiety she’s touching on are all too familiar to followers of Japanese manga and anime. Not surprisingly, Smyth visited Japan in 2004 to absorb its comic-book culture and confront one of its key dynamics—the objectification of the innocent girl and its corollary, the virulent sexual hostility to her.

“It’s so overt in their society. It’s not so overt over here, but it’s happening. So I took what was already discussed in my work, and took that Japanese influence to push it further, in a fantastical way— because anything you can imagine has been done in manga. There’s really nothing left to imagine. Every possible transgression and body-mod thing has been drawn.”

These works also echo the sexually twisted opus of infamous “outsider” artist and recluse Henry Darger who, in absolute solitude, created a 30,000- page sci-fi tome with a seeming pedophile streak to it (it was discovered only after his death in 1973). “He’s had a huge influence on fine art and illustration in the last 10 years,” says Smyth. “To think that was just made in private, the incredible and bizarre world he inhabited. Even the film [Jessica Yu’s documentary In the Realms of the Unreal] only touches briefly on the sadistic and horrific aspects of the work. And what was his motivation, his sexual motivation, in there?

“It goes even farther back, to Bosch and the fantastic worlds that he imagined. So there’s a long lineage of bizarro themes out there.”

AT MONASTIRAKI FROM TUESDAY, NOV.
4 TO FRIDAY, DEC. 7. VERNISSAGE ON
TUESDAY, NOV. 4, 5 P.M.