YVONNE TODD

Yvonne Todd
Frenzy (The Lamb’s Book Of Life series) 2007
lightjet print
108 x 135 cm

Yvonne Todd
Frenzy (detail)

Yvonne Todd
Pipe Study Face Prototype (Mauve Reaction series) 2008
lightjet print
20 x 20 cm

Yvonne Todd, born 1973, Auckland, New Zealand, lives and works in Auckland.

Yvonne Todd creates portraits of women as female characters, often the forgotten and marginalised, sourced from reality, literature and Todd’s imagination. these figures are often altered to create unsettling portraits filled with gawky 80′s nostalgia, empty gazes and poses, big hair and teeth, coupled with skilled post production altering faces just slightly and creating a shinny gloss that covers everything, nodding to methods used in commercial photography and advertising genres.

Trained in commercial photography before studying at art school and becoming an artist, Todd uses the same techniques required in commercial photographic studio portrait and product shoots. However, instead of using these techniques to create a sense of perfection, Todd creates images that are disquietingly a little bit off and not quite right. Todd’s fascination with artificial studio photography, as well as props, wigs and false teeth and post production through Photoshop, heightens the cliches used by Todd, through costume and aspects of performance to create these images of young women as artificial icons and reflections of past social roles. Todd often works from inspirations and ideas that are collected in her work book before shooting in studio with a 4×5 camera, using transparency sheet film before moving onto digital manipulation.

Todd counts memories of reading Virginia Andrews novels, ’beautiful teenage girls involuntarily corrupted by perverse ancestral spectacles’ as influence, along with stories of women as daughters or wives of rich families, forgotten in histories, or relegated to bylines. the artworks become portrait of product rather than person through the de-characterisation of the sitter through post production techniques that either hide or promote physical afflictions. in Todd’s images appearance is everything, but it’s what appearance actually is, that is being explored.

I’m really interested in manipulating the conventional and familiar.

- Yvonne Todd

Todd avoids the hackneyed sentiments of the fantasist and the drudgery of the unmitigated realist, instead amalgamating the two to form a unique oeuvre at once erotic, nostalgic and deeply effecting.

- Megan Dunn

My self-portraits are about historic bit-parts, real-life people who I feel compelled to become and inhabit. They represent my interest in life’s peripheral characters: Larry Fortensky vs. Elizabeth Taylor, for example. They aren’t a comment on beauty as much as my interest in the irrelevant and obscure.

- Yvonne Todd

But I am interested in the way costumes are tied to history, the way they carry character and narrative connotations.

- Yvonne Todd

I’m angling more for the pathetic. I respond to stoicism and piety, deflation and disappointment. I avoid hideous words like ‘empowerment’ or anything else in keeping with the heroic.

- Yvonne Todd

Yvonne Todd
Wet Sock (Vagrants’ Reception Centre) 2005
lightjet print
36 x 28.6 cm

Yvonne Todd
Fractoid (11 Colour Plates series) 2004
lightjet print
62.7 x 47 cm

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:

ARTIST

Yvonne Todd, worked in commercial photography before going to art school
interested in forgotten women
explores cliche portrait photography studio tricks, lighting and backdrops in own art
presents portraiture as product placement

ARTWORK

predominately of female figures
photographic imagery
merges commercial and fine art photography

AUDIENCE

accesses artwork through galleries and museums
may or may not pick up on the digital retouching that has been done to each image
links to advertising and magazine imagery familiar to them
may or may not know the history of the persona being presented to them as the figure in the artwork

WORLD

advertising and product placement
digital retouching
photographic portraiture
references 80′s culture and other historic time periods through costume

Yvonne Todd
Approximation Of Tricia Martin (Crater Of Phlox series) 2007
lightjet print
60 x 49 cm

Yvonne Todd
Springtime 2006
lightjet print
43.6 x 34.5 x 3.5 cm

THE FRAMES:

SUBJECTIVE

haunting, disquiet feelings
reminded of past times and history through the costumes
reactions to gaze of the sitter in the portrait
imaginative thought as to who the person and their scenario
aspects not quite right in the images

STRUCTURAL

photographic imagery
use of props and costume to reference previous portraiture techniques and times
photographed with studio lighting
predominantly soft tones
retouching to remove or strengthen impurities through Photoshop
western models and clothing
distortions in the portrait sitter’s appearance

CULTURAL

middle, upper class represented
explores notions of beauty, particularly artificial beauty
western portrait studios
predominant depiction of females, western, white women
referencing women as bylines, forgotten women from rich families, either from real life or fiction
young women, coming of age

POSTMODERN

appropriating commercial portrait studio props, lighting and retouching methods
humor and parody through the use of digital retouching to exaggerate a defect rather than to diminish it
references women figures from both real life and fiction
manipulating and changing the familiar, questioning conventions of beauty