Andrew Paul Wood on Heather Straka's photographs

Heather Straka: Do Not Resuscitate,
Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch
20 March - 17 April 2010

Familiar from manga, anime, street fashion and pop art is the Japanese concept of ero kawaii – that disturbingly paedophilic hybrid of Sanryo kitschy Hello Kitty cuteness and kinderwhore Lolita coquettishness that along with Japan’s economic power has spread throughout Asia to varying degrees. Perhaps it was an unconscious strategy for appearing non-threatening to preeminent Russian and American interests during the Cold War, or a parallel to the perverse obsession of a certain type of British Conservative with public school girls in uniform. The jury remains out.

It is an aesthetic that pervades every aspect of the photographic works making up Heather Straka’s Do Not Resuscitate at the Jonathan Smart Gallery. Straka is best known as a painter of intense detail, the canvasses worked up from carefully posed photographs. Recently the strain of the detailed brushwork has caused Straka to reconsider her process and move back a step to work on photography.

The exhibition falls naturally into two sections. The first is a wall of individual portraits of young female Japanese, Chinese and Korean models, saucily posed mid pouty puff of cigarette smoke like a shoddy faded Pat Pong advertisement for sexual services, dressed in immaculate and slightly tacky uniform of a manicurist, hairdresser or train attendant. Their perfect, exaggerated makeup, hair, poreless skin and the Preraphaelite sharpness of image emphasise the natural tendency of young Asian women toward a kind of porcelain doll neoteny (retention of childlike features, such as those exaggerated in manga and anime).

There is, too, a tacit dig at the cliché of many Westerners being unable to tell people of Asian descent apart either as discrete ethnic groupings or individuals. Straka makes a fetish of this with the consistent styling of these individual portraits, but at the same time goading us with subtle differences in pose, hair and features to recognise the distinct personalities striving for a kind of kinky mass-produced and standardised uniformity one might expect from the commercialisation of the erotic. Such subversion is the bread and butter of Straka’s oeuvre.

On the opposite wall is a tableau vivant reminiscent of the work of advertising-inspired neo-Baroque photographers like Jeff Wall. The same girls are gathered, still smoking, around a blonde and decidedly western (female, but boyish) half-draped nude ‘corpse’ on a gurney in a shabby, nondescript room. Is this the behind the scenes at a downmarket funeral parlour, some bizarre Third World hospital, a backroom organ-legging chopshop, or what? The air of neglect and decay is further enhanced by the ropey, leggy ivy strategically winding through the scene, which along with the draped sheet/shroud, strongly suggests the tropes of nineteenth century Academic painting – something that Straka has long delighted in playing naughty games with.

Is it a sort of self-conscious ironic revision of Orientalism? Perhaps that is going too far. The visual pleasure of the retinal candy is more than sufficient without trying to draw out readings. Yummy.

Embracing mortality

Heather Straka: The Sleeping Room
Hocken Library Gallery, Dunedin
4 April - 26 May 2009

Heather Straka was last year’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow down at the University of Otago, and so this is her presentation of the years work. Some of it has already been shown in Auckland, particularly the ‘body parts’ paintings based on autopsies and dissections. There were some simmering erotic portraits of young women in that smaller Anna Bibby show, but they were in the minority.

However in this current Dunedin show of about twenty-five works, those portraits dominate the walls and space - despite the blackly humorous exhibition title referring to death. The ghoulish anatomical images are in little groups of three or four, and are much smaller.

The androgynous women that Straka focuses on have a hint of the demonic, a sneering menace that switches occasionally to a slightly hammy gothic. These girl-boys glower with an almost imperceptible whisper of humour. Mixed into their theatrical intensity is a vaguely smirking knowingness, a celebration of their own seductive sexual powers - the pleasure of taunting and teasing.

Here Straka explores a carefully thought out vocabulary of body language, mixed with nuances of facial expression and architectural props. Half a face and body, baring an exposed flattened nipple, peers around the edge of a corner. In another, a contorted twisting back, with straining face turning to the viewer over her compressed shoulder – in a tiled bathroom. A third has tightly bound breasts that instead of concealing femininity, accentuate it through the transparency of the bandage. It is all double (even triple or quadruple) talk. Lesbian erotica, with the ambiguous gender also designed to make straight and gay men (and straight women) horny.

While it is two shows in one, perhaps there is a unity present after all. Male ejaculation is traditionally called a ‘little death’, prostitutes in England used to rent rooms overlooking sites of public execution (allegedly to increase the client’s pleasure, having coitus while watching a hanging), and sex and death – through women often dying in childbirth – have long been traditionally linked.

Or maybe a rumination on not only mortality but the transience of life, and with that, the transience of desire - the quickness of pleasure. How quickly lust and/or love fades. Half the show displays certain semiotic buttons or triggers that arouse or pique interest. The other half declares the stupidity of desire, and the dumbness of life itself – in the face of death.

Straka’s grey tonality suits these themes. Even such sexy come ons have skin patinas glazed with the stony hues of mortality. All chroma is carefully knocked back. As with corpses devoid of body-heat, all temperatures are icy. There is a wicked aura of necrophilia in the portraits, despite the women’s lively eyes and flickering half-smiles.

I like these works of Straka more than her other earlier paintings. The faces contain some qualities of self-portraiture, not literally as physiognomies, but as rebuses for aspects of her personality. There is an element of self knowledge here, perhaps some wisdom about mental games and sex. An intriguing exhibition.

Straka show

Heather Straka: (Life) Still
Anna Bibby
11 November - 29 November 2008

When it comes to eating, although I’m no vegan, I’m not a rabid carnivore either. But I have a sweet tooth, so I was somewhat perturbed to discover my stomach rumbling while examining Heather Strakas’ paintings of dissected body parts. These she studied in part of the Otago Medical School in Dunedin, while being this year’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow.

The images in question were of sliced cross-sections of human brain, delicately coloured – and perhaps a little bleached by formalin. Despite the occasional straggly vein, they look, I realised later, unnervingly similar to slices of ornate ice cream cake I used to greatly enjoy as a child at birthday parties. It’s a particularly delicious variety of creamy ice cream that I suspect is unobtainable now.

The other paintings of severed fingers, intact eyes and various organs are not so yummy. As with Straka’s style of image making, everything is tidy with no bloody, horrid torn or raggedy bits. And in a soft and dark umber-grey light that, with a few drops or puddles of strange secretions, is slightly mysterious.

Straka has also included several paintings of dead roses and orchids, with fallen wilted petals, as well as one painting of a clammy chicken wing from the supermarket. A very funny surprise in this context.

There are also some great erotic portraits of a glowering, androgenous young woman: one frontal with tightly bound breasts; another sternly looking over a twisted back. She is described by the artist’s beautifully worded, evil title, as a ‘human tissue monger’. I think that means she is in charge of one of the dissecting rooms.

I normally dislike Straka’s portraits because of their Lindauer–like stylisation and the smooth contours of the heads’ edges. The silky smoothness of the dark surrounding space upsets me. These though, along with the grisly dissection works, I really like. Perhaps it is the humour which gets to me, bubbling way down below the immensely serious subject-matter, only to occasionally, very briefly, rise to the surface.