Sim Smith is proud to announce Corri-Lynn Tetz’s first UK solo exhibition Tender Buttons. Corri-Lynn Tetz is a Canadian artist whose observe concentrates on the feminine determine, with imagery taken from a collected archive of discovered imagery and private images, to create indulgent, dream-like painted scenes that seize the vulnerabilities, enactments, and clichés of femininity.
For a few years Tetz labored from discovered photographs from pornography and trend magazines, emulating poses of achieved artists – the actor and the mannequin – in finishing up the simulated act of flawless feminineness. Her work have perpetually looked for the candy spot between publicity, efficiency, and the formulaic nature of what it means to be a lady. For this new physique of work, Tetz determined to work with folks she knew, photographing buddies and establishing scenes for them to play in. Tetz directed and included what she needed to color in these scenes, fur coats, pores and skin, silk tassels, extra weak and tender components.
“I needed to color for pleasure for this present. The pleasure for me of portray a fur coat…” – Corri Lynn Tetz, June 2024.
In these scenes, the figures transcend the on a regular basis. Her buddies and acquaintances play gown up for this exhibition. Typically shrouded in nostalgic symbols of glamour and sophistication, hand-me-downs of grandmother’s fur coats and fringed jackets, silk clothes and underwear, seemingly passé of their connotations however as efficient as ever as sexual props. These photographs are wildly poetic with many moments additionally created by probability. One portray Gaia Reads Matisse, is a portray of Gaia Matisse, the great-great granddaughter for the painter who Tetz met in New York and invited to pose in her grandmother’s furs. These work open up new moments, an area to play in an imagined panorama the place girls create, painting and watch.
The exhibition title took place after a dialog with one in all Tetz’s finest buddies. She is a musician and introduced up the Broadcast album “Tender Buttons”.
Phrase combos generally have the identical impact on me as colors enjoying off one another, or a juicy brush mark, poetic and sensory. I had actually cherished Broadcast a few years in the past and so I began listening to them once more once I was working within the studio. I used to be making the portray ‘Eclipse’ and I might really feel a powerful connection between what I used to be listening to and the picture that was forming. It is a type of hazy, atmospheric, vitality that the panorama backdrop and the glowing spots had…it paired so nicely with the witchy, captivating vocals and synth. Atmospherically it match, and for the portray ‘Tender Buttons’, it was excellent. The gesture in that portray feels tender and type of naive, and I laughed pondering of the nipple as a physique button. I hadn’t realized on the time, however Broadcast obtained the title from a Gertrude Stein e book, and I am now simply digging into that. It simply provides one other layer of that means to uncover. I like making these connections after work or exhibits are made, it makes all of it extra of a technique of discovery than of understanding.” – Corri Lynn Tetz, June 2024
Tetz handles the paint with a tenderness that has permeated all the vitality of this exhibition; gentle, gentle and delicate. On prime of delicate underpainting, unfastened brushstrokes of powdery pigments make up the curve of a breast or a sway of a fringe. There are fingers held, heads tilted again as if to obtain a kiss and hair tucked behind the ear, female tropes that now we have all come to know and do. Tetz creates these scenes knowingly, suggesting and questioning our female place on the planet and its historical past, inviting viewers to ponder their very own narratives.
The work inform a narrative of expertise. Tetz grew up in a spiritual tradition that was very targeted on boys… “It was good to be a lady however nice to be a boy…” she states when speaking in regards to the topic. It led to her rejecting femininity as a younger lady after which, to her spending her grownup life studying easy methods to perceive and navigate concepts round femininity and sweetness. At artwork faculty she was instructed that she couldn’t be an educational, clever painter if she was to make use of fairly, female content material or female expertise and that if a portray was to not present the face of the girl it portrayed, then it objectified her. Tetz performs with this notion in her work, portray girls with a female contact, with a female eye, as a lady herself. Ladies will even view these work after all and what’s going to their expertise of them be?
She doesn’t concern herself with proper or mistaken, as an alternative, she concentrates on her personal expertise with femininity. She doesn’t suggest a really perfect magnificence within the exhibition however one thing extra fragile and weak. Flaws exist within the work and Tetz leaves them seen, deciding to depart imperfections in an effort to disrupt an in any other case idealised magnificence. Tetz has perpetually tread a blurry and difficult path, the place many concepts across the female intersect. It’s a path that she asks us to observe, allowing us to entrust the method of discovery on this exhibition. Tetz is a painter, however she can be a seductive storyteller, and therein her energy lies.