Cleopatra wore Prada

January, 2012

We are all drawn to the past in some way or another. John Neylon explores the historically inspired work of Alexia Sinclair.

Although the past is another country and all that, our imagination still likes to go there. Whether that be in the spirit of tragedy or farce, who cares?  It’s all entertainment. There’s a portrait of King Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, in Alexia Sinclair’s The Royal Dozen Series. The best-known formal portrait of the monarch (1701), by Hyacinthe Rigaud, is a catwalk tush-shaking confection of wig tossing, insouciance. Sinclair’s Louis appears to reference Rigaud’s portrait in casting the king in relaxed mode, draping him in the coronation robe with gold fleur-de-lys design on a blue background. Some carnivale masks create the impression that this languid lad is about to party. Others in the artist’s Royal Dozen Series, particularly Lorenzo de’ Medici – The Magnificent, also create the impression of playing dress ups, cross-dressing and period mashing. Occasionally the mask slips. Sinclair’s Hannibal looks as if he’d be happier on a Harley than an elephant.

The artist works between images when building each series, a process which usually takes about three years and involves creating hundreds of (Photoshop) layers to resolve each image. Each image is conceived in the artist’s imagination and consolidated by research and storyboards. It is then deconstructed into component parts which allows the artist to make decisions about where the different elements such as background, props and models can be sourced. Sourcing imagery has involved travelling to different corners of the world, making costumes, collecting props and looking for models with the right kind of appearance and persona to ‘become’ the subject. One example within Homage is the image of the Empress Agrippina (Caligula’s sister) sitting on some grass surrounded by lots of nice, poisonous mushrooms. The stone building in the background was sourced from a Roman archway photographed by Sinclair in Morocco. The lion was a Lennon Brothers Circus employee. The artist crawled into the cage for some necessary close ups. Sinclair’s experience and skills as a highly awarded and much in demand commercial photographer are critical in creating seamless transitions within often very complex compositions. The end result is a form of visual seduction, driven partly by the artist’s love of visual spectacle and also a desire to re-invent historical personages within her imagination and that of viewers. “ Ultimately,” Sinclair has said, “I suppose I’m interested in the popularizing of history.” 

There is another dimension to her work. The Regal Twelve Series (included in Samstag Art Museum’s 2009 Phantasia exhibition) feature women who the artist regards as has having led extraordinary lives. In interpreting each character (including Cleopatra, Queen Christina of Sweden, Isabella of Spain and Catherine the Great) the artist has sought to invoke some sense of the power such women must have wielded (apart from the usual poisoning, imprisoning, betraying and so on) through force of personality and commanding visual presence. These figures are contemporary conflations inflected with the aesthetic codes of glossy mags and high fashion photography. That’s the buzz with Sinclair’s work. It walks a tightrope between the luxe et volupté of beauty ads and the manic edginess associated with collapsing time. The artist has stated that she wants to “produce fine art in a commercial arena”.

Photographer and writer Robert McFarlane has commented that Sinclair “is an artist whose vision is suspended between the ancient world and cyber space”. 

It is easy to experience Sinclair’s Homage as a one-off experience and be ‘seduced’ by the wunderkammer-like compositions of sumptuous details encountered in each tableau. But it can also be a window through which to view the rich history of ‘special effects’ photography, which has its origins in the experiments associated with 19th century pioneer photography. From one perspective there is little difference between Sinclair’s approach and that of Henry Peach Robinson’s (1830 – 1901) photomontage method of joining multiple negatives to form a single image. Such experimental work coincided with the popularity of historicism as seen in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the classical subject matter of the so-called ‘Victorian Olympian’ painters of the Royal Academy. Photography rode this wave, particularly the market for ‘tableaux vivants’ which involved artists photographing studio scenarios based on historical characters and events or images inspired by historical fiction or history paintings. This is a rich vein of cultural expression which includes the photo-tableaux of David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson (based on the novels of Sir Walter Scott) and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photo-allegoricals and mise-en-scenes, including a 12-image series based on Arthurian subjects.

Rich pickings indeed without even considering the vigor of this tradition as it constantly re-invented itself across the 20th century in the form of Surrealist photography and later, the critique of mass media codes of representation in Cindy Sherman’s multiple personas and the faux narratives of Gregory Crewdson’s staged events. Against this backdrop, Sinclair’s imagery comes to earth around the late 1960s – early 1970s as a loose fusion of Glam Rock segueing into New Romanticism fantasies where everyone’s dream is to get caught in a costume party drug bust in a home counties mansion – or better still, Versailles.

Alexia Sinclair, Homage: The Royal Dozen (2007 – 2010) & The Regal Twelve (2005 – 2007)
Artspace Gallery, Adelaide Festival Centre
Until February 19