Breanna Gordon: Introspect

Tache presents Introspect, the debut solo exhibition of fourteen new and recent paintings and installations by Canadian-British artist Breanna Gordon. The show’s exploration of mental health is shaped by the artist’s lived experience. For Gordon, navigating this topic sees painting become a tool for healing and situates her work within current wider dialogue on the health benefits of making and experiencing art.

Gordon’s densely layered compositions explore the pervasive nature of anxiety, depersonalisation and derealisation, which are reflected in a dark palette, dramatic shadowplay and elaborate patterning. Her painterly practice renders a cast of feminine figures, fauna and domestic objects in the chiaroscuro of the Italian Baroque: works are not anchored to time or to place, but float along a softer boundary between reality and perception. 

In service of the deeply personal nature of her practice, Gordon solely depicts women she knows intimately and objects of sentimental value to her. Interested in the decontextualisation of language, she lifts tongue-in-cheek titles from contemporary popular culture; an idiomatic positioning of each painting within the throes of twenty-first century girlhood.

Monumental in scale and informed by the textiles of William Morris, Deep Chaos Within and Perpetual Inbetweenness are sites upon which pattern formalises our susceptibility to entrapment by the most recognisable, even predictable, of psychological phenomena. Intrusive thoughts and rumination cycles function, under Gordon, according to Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s principles of artistry:“to mask the construction of our pattern enough to prevent people from counting the repeats of our pattern, while we manage to lull their curiosity to trace it out.” The best patterns, he wrote, “had a look of satisfying mystery.”  

In the self-portrait Ghost Image, the artist depicts herself twice in the same composition. Painted after a significant shift in her personal life, the double image represents Gordon’s inner confliction about the “right” direction to take in her life, and considers the potential for multiple versions of oneself to exist simultaneously. The function of the double self is questioned further in Lucky Girl, whose subject refuses to meet the gaze of her own reflection. From lucky girl syndrome, to red nail theory, to piping hot tea, Gordon codes virality into a new language of symbolism fit to represent the contemporary drive to manifest, medicalise and optimise, no matter the cost to our true mental wellbeing.