© Elene Usdin
Elene Usdin is member of collective Hartland Villa. She is an illustrator who has been published in several magazines worldwide and has created some lovely children’s books. But now it’s her photographic works, her self-portraits, that are drawing attention.
Take her image Matelas for example. Her body, self-entangled in mattresses, is here for us to explore. Her self is somehow always illusive; not all parts are be revealed in a single moment but rather over time in flowing movement. She’s not giving much away: her face is often partially concealed, sometimes completely behind a generic plastic mask, eyes sealed shut. Bare walls… and no furniture except mattresses used like armour surrounding the body, protecting it from our gaze.
Beds – or more accurately, mattresses – are the foundation. But often they are divorced from their function: either stacked on top of one another, or placed as if propped up against a wall, or set up vertically. The mattress as a site of a much assailed and private activity is decontextualized only to be reinvested with ambiguous content. A mattress leans against a wall, as if seeking a state of rest. Its awkward pose causes its internal architecture to manifest itself: its surface erupts in a constellation of cascading rivulets and regular tactile protrusions, a profile rather alien to the idea of rest. The tone and somewhat battered air of the image appears to indicate that this is a mattress that has done its earthly duty, and is now inexorably invested with the memory of those who reclined and/or dallied upon it.
Self-portraiture came about almost incidentally for Usdin, when she was travelling to Marseille in the South of France in 2003. In the intimacy of the hotel room, Usdin created a universe for her boyfriend and us to enter, the hotel room as a site filled with narrative potential. Familiar yet foreign, a hotel room combines experiences of both intimacy and anonymity. The intimacy can be almost eerie as she divulges herself to the world, to us, to him. Using the mattresses, the mask as armour to cover what is left of her being.
Self-portraits can be carefully staged to show an audience only what the artist wishes to project, or deeply revealing, inadvertently displaying feelings of anguish and pain. Usdin is self-studying her self, remembering the past, releasing her emotion. Whatever way she chooses to construct her images, she is forced to study her own persona both physically and emotionally. Self-fashioning, she associates her images with certain items of clothing, hairstyle, furniture, or scenery, these choices reveals a unique perspective on the artist’s view of herself.
Throughout the century, women artists have been appropriating, inverting and challenging the modes of self-portraiture, which reinforce the masculinity of the artist in both myth and history. This has been a necessary exercise for women who wished to represent themselves as ‘the artist’, since the standard means by which this was signified were defined in ways exclusive of women. In some cases, it was enough merely to show yourself with the tools of the trade to subvert convention and declare yourself an independent woman. At other times, more active parodies and pastiches of the tropes associated with the artist myth were needed to find a place from which the woman as artist could speak. Whichever tack was taken, women’s representations of themselves, which engaged with artist definitions altered those definitions and the very ways in which self-portraiture as a genre can be read. The more fragmented or fractured our experience in the world the more disjointed our reflections. “My images,” she states “are like lucid dreams, incidental, like a game, words in a poem, staging the body and re-appropriating the space the canvas the objects around it.”
Usdin has subsequently explored this technique further while working with the collective Hartland Villa, as part of an ongoing series she has transformed, transvestites herself into various dramatic heroines, vulnerable variations of seemingly mundane and mute objects.
The accoutrements of daily life are, of course, everywhere infused with her body and human echo, objects designed to contour themselves to her shapes and needs; Usdin reiterates a relationship, and suggests a parallel psychological echo, an intimation of anthropomorphism that is very absorbing and true. In a way, looking at her work is akin to the experience of watching an apartment building being emptied, where for fleeting moments there are glimpses into rooms totally stripped of human presence, but still imbued with human drama. The results of an inquiry such as this might be purposefully inconclusive, but are heady with possibilities.
Text by Sophie Ekwe Bell
© All pictures: Elene Usdin