Exhibition Dates: August 26 - October 7, 2023
Exhibition Venue: Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices, Winnipeg, Canada
Dancing For Dummies is a solo exhibition of paintings, ceramics, and performance video at Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices, Winnipeg, Canada (26th August- 7th October 2023). The production and shipment of works was funded by Canada Council for the Arts and Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices. The exhibition was by invitation of gallery director and curator Luther Konadu. Eyres’ paintings are based on “before” images found in beauty makeover manuals from the 1980s. Her methodology includes selecting, scanning, and editing these images before painting them in a realist manner on small scale (30 x 30 cm) canvases. These paintings are hung above a mantel-like shelf that outlines the gallery, displaying a series of ceramics works based on books (including a stack of For Dummies textbooks, Sweet Valley High books, ashtrays, a sandwich, a bowl of cereal, a box of matches). The ceramic sculptures are rendered by hand with realist detail to become corpse-like duplicates that evoke an ambiguous, psychological space that invites viewers to project their own narratives. In the basement, Eyres presents Learn to Dance, a single-channel video projection. The work emulates the format of a dance tutorial and features the artist in self-transformation as dance instructor and three students. Using greenscreen technology, the characters are set in a 1980s style doll house. The dialogue borrows language from a Learn to Lap-Dance VHS tape, self-help literature, ‘Lacan for Beginners’ and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Eyres wrote, shot, edited, and performed all the characters. The exhibition was accompanied by a commissioned text by Alex Athea and reviewed by Rodney La Tourelle for the February 2024 edition of Art Review. A screening of early videos from Eyres was held at Winnipeg Film Group in collaboration with the gallery on 2nd September 2023. The exhibition was viewed by over 500 people and the screening was attended by 60 people.