…and so beautiful again

In 1990, artist Chrysanne Stathacos staged the premiere exhibition of her hairdresses, and first uttered the name Anne de Cybelle, a name that has since become indissoluble from her own. Fifteen years hence, the hairdresses maintain their potency and map the genesis of the considerable body of printed works that followed. While her approach to printmaking is largely unconventional in its application, Stathacos exploits its most basic and traditional aspect: the creation of an imprint or trace, a ‘history’. This marking of time is engendered on many levels within the works presented here, most notably in the mechanism of historical corollary. Stathacos deepens the connection to time by fleshing out a continuum, situating her work within a particular trajectory, and engaging notions of sensuality, sexuality, feminism and femininity along the way.

Chrysanne Stathacos has consistently used organic material – hair, roses, ivy – as a print medium, imbuing her work with an immediacy suggestive of the body, and specifically the female body. During the process of printing, as this original matter leaves its physical residue in evidence, so does the material’s symbolism attach to the work, and Stathacos coaxes both the layering of imagery and the accumulating referents. Inking tufts of cropped human hair (often her own), and pulling it through a press in combination with artist’s linen or canvas, Stathacos generates lengths of elaborately patterned textile that she then fashions into elegant gowns. Hair itself is a powerful sign, evocative of impulses such as sensuality, taboo, fetish, seduction, power, and memory. Sensually resplendent, the dresses convey an unapologetic transgression by essentially covering the female body with hair, refuting conformity to a fetishized ideal. There is an inherent rebelliousness to the works, as they engage on the level of proclamation. Taking form as fashion, the works borrow from that system’s infrastructure by exteriorizing desire, creating an isolated channel between wearer and world upon which to communicate a message. “It is clothing which gives the body its relief, and for this reason, it must be considered an advantage, in the sense that it protects us from direct view of what, as sentience, is devoid of signification.” (Hegel, Esthetique, 1944) Trailing wisps, defiant clumps and swirling tendrils suffuse the surface of these sculptural hairdresses, and whisper secret entreaties.

The character of Anne de Cybelle provides the blueprint for their construction. Stathacos telescopes back to the 19th century to find her working in a time that marginalized its women artists, eclipsing their future stake as historically relevant. Anne de Cybelle railed against the establishment, gaining notoriety by making spectacular dresses from the materials readily available (her own locks and scavenged canvas) and upstaging her male counterparts. Though clearly not the guilt-inspired hair shirts of the Middle Ages, Anne de Cybelle’s hairdresses did have an investment in an economy of shame, serving to decry the patriarchy for its oppressive practices. With homage as her primary tool, Stathacos sets out to correct history’s misdeed by faithfully recreating Anne de Cybelle’s intricate dresses and holding them up as triumphant icons of female ingenuity.

It turns out, though, that Anne de Cybelle is a fictive heroine, conjured by Stathacos as a connective thread to an unarticulated past. Certainly, legions of female artists were orphaned by history, and in a bold, feminist stroke, Stathacos felt compelled to give them a name, and to imagine how they may have navigated their way through a time less receptive to the contributions of women artists. The venerable Winston Churchill once remarked, “History shall be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Perhaps Chrysanne Stathacos keenly sensed a broader opportunity.

– Claire Christie