Untitled (2006) by Leanne Eisen [barph.wordpress.com]All Eyes on Eisen by Leah Sandals
NOW Magazine - 02/12/09
(Excerpt)
Whether you celebrate Vagina Day or Valentine's Day this weekend (or both), sex and gender are ardently on the brain.
O'Born Contemporary dives into these themes with Peepshow #5, a group show featuring moody motel scenes by Torontonian Finn O'Hara, sexy if solitary self-portraits by Holland's Camilla Holmgren, sex-trade sites by Ryerson student Leanne Eisen and a selection of anonymous mid-century nudes.
O'Hara's and Holmgren's work is okay, but Eisen's colour photos are the highlight. For her 2006 series, Play, she reconstructs a brothel, a strip club and other sex trade sites in dollhouse scale, then photographs and enlarges those scenes.
Eisen's settings range from the lurid, like a sparkly-bedspreaded, mirror-walled room, to the bare bones, like a dingy sunken-mattress, wrung-out-washrag affair. In all cases, Eisen fascinates with sheer meticulousness. Bowls of condoms, rows of fetish footwear, piles of porn mags and side tables of toys, lube and egg timers are all convincingly miniaturized.
The detail's not just material; Eisen also reproduces a long list of "in-house rules". Some are cryptic, like "Every walk must be verified before customers leave." Others get grammatically creative, like "When customers are in parlor everyone must parlor." And others are prison-like - "Visits on Sunday (1 hr)", "Phone calls on Sunday (1)".
Overall, the photos give a sense of these places as schizophrenic sites for both far-out fantasy and cold commerce, for potential ecstasy and possible exploitation.
Leanne Eisen
Play
The games we play as children are rehearsals for the roles we play in life. Traditional toys for girls nurture homemaker stereotypes, simulating traditional domestic roles through play. In these photographs, I am exploring the possibility of the same staging taking place with the prolific, but publicly hidden occupation of prostitution. By constructing these scenes in miniature, I project representations of the sex industry onto the medium of the conventional dollhouse. As polar opposites, the homemaker and the sex worker are highly constructed and restrictive roles, the most deeply-rooted myths of the feminine.
Pieced together from many sources of representation these constructed spaces can be peered-into and examined.
* update: I am now constructing a seven room 1/12 scale dollhouse brothel, and will be extending this series over the next few months.
Pieced together from many sources of representation these constructed spaces can be peered-into and examined.
* update: I am now constructing a seven room 1/12 scale dollhouse brothel, and will be extending this series over the next few months.
