Ever since his "Self-Portrait With Combat Nymphos of Saigon" (pictured) caused a big stink in the Canadian art world of the late '80s, painter Chris Cran has been messing with people's minds. "Nymphos" juxtaposes highly modelled self-portraits with images found in a '60s porn mag of sexily-clad ladies fighting Vietnamese soldiers. The resulting outcry--from anti-porn soapbox feminists who asked that he literally burn the piece to fundamentalist ministers defending it as a poignant statement about the usefulness of women in the ongoing battle against communism--set Cran on a mission: "To use my art to screw with people's ideas about perception."
And that's what he's done in his new exhibit Surveying the Damage 1977-1997. Because the pieces vary stylistically from '50s kitschy stuff to contemporary realism, Cran's exhibit feels more like a group outing than a solo one. But the self-portraiture gives it a unity: it plays with the viewer's way of looking at and interpreting the piece. "I hold the viewer in limbo," says Cran, "by simultaneously becoming artist, voyeur and village idiot."
Cran double-dares you to take a peek at Galerie Liane et Danny Taran of the Saidye Bronfman Centre, to Jan. 9. :
Ever since his "Self-Portrait With Combat Nymphos of Saigon" (pictured) caused a big stink in the Canadian art world of the late '80s, painter Chris Cran has been messing with people's minds. "Nymphos" juxtaposes highly modelled self-portraits with images found in a '60s porn mag of sexily-clad ladies fighting Vietnamese soldiers. The resulting outcry--from anti-porn soapbox feminists who asked that he literally burn the piece to fundamentalist ministers defending it as a poignant statement about the usefulness of women in the ongoing battle against communism--set Cran on a mission: "To use my art to screw with people's ideas about perception."