Sondra Meszaros

Collages seek to disrupt objectification of the female form.

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Since the Dada movement of the early 1900s, female artists have used collage to critique, provoke and re-imagine representations of the female body, piecing together new narratives and visually dynamic hybrids. Calgary-based artist and educator Sondra Meszaros, who is showing a series of five collages at Norberg Hall in Calgary until March 5, is no exception.

Made with images from a small collection of Coronet magazine, a general interest American digest published from 1936 to 1971, her intimate collages highlight a penchant for collecting, layering and rearranging. Configured as diptychs, they offer poetic yet disquieting parallels between nature and the female form. 

Meszaros is drawn to images that confound her, and, over the years, has amassed an exhaustive archive of photographic imagery, whether from online sources or vintage books and magazines. It’s a way for her to think through issues around the aesthetics and power dynamics of sexuality, an endeavour central to both her studio practice and her teaching job at the Alberta University of the Arts. 

The show’s title, Making Strange, acts as a catalyst and a framework for her collages. The idiom, a favourite phrase of her mother, means to act up or to be nervous or shy when encountering a stranger or an unusual situation. Meszaros finds the phrase empowering, lending credence to her penchant for complicating, disrupting and slowing the process of reading visual images. 

In these collages, she simultaneously hides women’s faces while revealing them. She arouses thoughts on aesthetics, sexuality and the gaze – or, in some cases, the hidden gaze. In other words, she portrays women making strange. While the expression is traditionally applied to children, Meszaros uses it to cajole her viewers into confronting their own gaze. 

In Making Strange #2, two female subjects are placed side by side. On the left, a barricade of icicles blocks the woman’s face, and to the right, the other woman looks down, her mouth and nose covered by a vibrant pink flower. These obstructions create dueling emotions that shift between frustration and fascination. The intimate format also draws attention to boundaries between private and public space. While both delicate and seductive, the work effectively obstructs us, playing havoc with our desire to gaze upon the women. The effect is to give them agency.

Collage has a profound ability to reveal cultural assumptions and expectations. In Making Strange #3, a female subject wears a headscarf and seems to be looking at the image on the right, a pink flower obscured by a nude, her body bathed in vertical lines of shadow and light. The women seem to coexist in mutual modesty and esteem, shifting our desire to the flirty pink bloom.

Flowers have long been associated with femininity, and they are here too, but in ways that reshape perception by challenging the male gaze. In Making Strange #5, for instance, one exquisite hand, its nails adorned with red polish, sensually caresses the other as we shift our gaze to vibrant flowers that obscure the face of a woman in a Hungarian folk costume. 

These poetic encounters and visual disruptions are a clever way to bring attention to the way women are objectified. Meszaros’s floral gestures refocus our attention, allowing us to view them as agents of their own worlds, desires and bodies. ■

Sondra Meszaros, Making Strange, at Norberg Hall in Calgary from Jan. 22 to March 5, 2022.

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