WINNIE TRUONG at ESP (Erin Stump Projects, 1086½ Queen West) to October 2. 416-834-0005. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Hair is at the heart of Winnie Truong’s The Fringes, an intriguing set of drawings at ESP. An erotic ornament and a vestige of our animal nature that arouses both desire and revulsion, and an emblem of identity and gender, hair, for Truong, is a marker of difference.
She’s one of several recent young OCADU grads who play at the edge of commercial visual culture, referencing the insipidly pretty youth archetypes of fashion, television, advertising and album covers. Truong’s bland and beautiful faces are a backdrop for the unexpected things she subjects them to. Hair mutates and subverts whatever claim to generic normalcy they possess.
Her subjects are outsiders, as the punning title of the show suggests, their hirsute beauty on the verge of morphing into the grotesque. In many drawings, the elaborate hair-dos take on a devouring life of their own, threatening to engulf their subjects.
The huge do in Hollow Comfort is a baroque dream of suburban girlishness, a mass of perfectly plaited lavender braids. Not so the figure’s arms, which seem almost wrenched from their sockets, hanging with creepy dead weight. This unsettling confluence of prettiness and the morbid gives a familiar horror-movie jolt. You’ve got to wonder what sort of face lurks under all that hair.
In Watchin’ Girl, hair serves as a coy veil, both shielding and flirting, suggesting a hidden deformity just beneath the surface. In Splitting Image and Matter Of Manhood, hair on generically male and female faces shows its potential to render gender ambiguous.
Using hair as a metaphor and a ploy, Truong explores our anxieties about appearance, playing on our complex cultural and visual assumptions in ways that are both disturbing and strangely familiar.
art@nowtoronto.com
