Janieta Eyre

Janieta Eyre (born 1971) is British-born photographer who lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Her work has been shown across Canada and the United States, and has been featured in exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Iceland, Colombia, England, France, South Korea, and Germany.

She is most known for her works in self-portraiture, in which she presents herself as a set of twins, z engage with the possibilities of multiple identities in the construction of self. Eyre uses elaborate props and costumes to disrupt the fixity of her images.

Janieta Eyre has participated in Scotiabank's CONTACT Photography Festival numerous times and "Constructing Mythologies" was a featured exhibition of the 2013 festival.

Her works were the inspiration for Canadian singer-songwriter JF Robitaille's 2013 music video for "Black and White" from the album Rival Hearts.

Background info Eyre was born in London, England. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1988 and studied Magazine Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University before starting part-time studies in photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

She began her creative career as a writer and claims that if she had remained in Britain, she would have continued as a poet or a novelist. In a North American culture dominated by film and television, she could make a greater impact with images.

Photographic work Eyre's photographs converge on performance, photography, and digital media. Her works have been compared to the experiments of early feminist photographers such as Claude Cahun, Madame Yevonde, Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman, due to a fascination with spirit photography. through a collage of costumes and objects in which all symbols become abstraction Eyre's photographs, full of private charms, magical emblems and eccentric rituals, Her photographs are strong on narrative content and rich in atmosphere are very much about public persona and social acceptance. The practice of twinning fostered the myth that the second entity is actually her dead sister. The myth is not confirmed to be entirely true nor untrue. Eyre draws inspiration from the idea of having past lives; in having "two images of myself." and thinks of her photographs as automatisms. She thinks of her art as a healing process that can be used as we become increasingly alienated from our bodies and selves through advanced technology. She hopes that through her personal art she can become more connected. Janieta is more interested in exploring inner lives The subjects are eviscerated, yet also confrontational and erotic. In one image, My Little Piglet, Eyre stands with rows of breasts exposed like the teats of a sow, near a pram with a piglet in a bonnet, In another diptych, depicting genetics gone mad, and sarcastically titled Motherhood, two heads sprout gratuitously from one body with their baby, the severed head of a sheep they hold in their arms. "People are often appalled by it," she says, referring to the series as a whole – or rather, to its presentation of some of the darker emotions that may attend pregnancy. This was Eyre's way of confronting all sides of a physical and spiritual metamorphosis In black and white, mixed-media portraits, the subject matter consists of girls and shifting landscape, capturing moments of transition. The photographs aim to touch on the potential of girls just before adulthood, and the sense of hope and/or possibility that they contain.

Film work Eyre's first film, the 13-minute short Now We Understand Each Other, is based on part of a short story that Eyre wrote at seventeen about an older woman who believes that two dolls are her children, as well as a play she wrote in her thirties about family violence. The main character, played by Kate Trotter, converses with twin dolls she believes are her daughters, recounting past loves and infidelities. Hans Bellmer's grotesque dolls were the biggest influence on Eyre's story. She commissioned artist Jason McClennen to make dolls that looked as realistic as possible, based on the likeness of her own daughter. The film speaks to accidents and contingencies of the past that define the person that one becomes, in leaving traces of other, possible, unrealized lives. The darker aspects of motherhood are further explored in the film, notably the idea of a mother bearing children she doesn't like.

Film performances Letters from Home, directed by Mike Hoolboom, premiered in the Toronto International Film Festival, 1996

Selected public collections Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto National Gallery of Art, Reykjavik, Iceland Ciudad de Cultura, Fundacion Municipal, Salamanca, Spain

Bailey & Company, Inc., Toronto Shadow Play, Toronto Microsoft, Seattle, Washington Seymour Collection, Vancouver, British Columbia Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida Hart House, University of Toronto Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa