Jennifer Anyan
Jennifer Anyan is a Lecturer in Media and Fashion Styling at Southampton Solent University. She has been involved in a number of exhibitions drawing on her dual role as an artist and fashion stylist, often creating mixed media installations that explore ideas about clothing and style especially in relation to the public display of identity. Her work is informed by her interests in popular culture and representations of dress; critical theory, media and presentational styles; and museology and the politics of display.
This commission enabled Jennifer to begin to explore some of these concerns in terms of English identity and regional difference. Returning to an earlier interest, Jennifer began to explore some of the stylistic devices used by populist celebrity magazines. In recent years these publications have created a unique genre in which celebrities are scrutinised by an almost forensic examination, usually without the subject's consent, and often without even their knowledge. The imagery is one of an apparent intimate portrait, or portrayal, but often achieved as the result of deception or concealment. The resulting pictures, usually of poor quality because of the manner in which they acquired, have the aesthetic characteristics of surveillance, the invasion of privacy, and the use of deception and the telephoto lens.
The artist adopted a similar approach to record her own images of ordinary people in a number of locations throughout England. The purpose of gathering such images was to examine whether, in a homogenised world in which every high street in the country is filled with the same national (and even global) chain stores, there was a sense of regional difference, or even idiosyncrasy. If everyone buys clothes from the same shops, and reads the same magazines, then what is the scope for regional variation?
Ever since Dick Hebdige's exploration of style1 thirty years ago, it has been assumed that the minutiae of subcultural difference derives from youth culture fulfilling the need for a sense belonging through group identity. However, it became evident that this was not the case. Many of the images have focussed on anomalous or incongruous dress codes which, in spite of considerable conformity within marked regional difference, a sense of eccentricity across geographical, age and social boundaries, may indeed be a national trait.
If such differences do exist, in what sense do these images represent a national style? What unites them to portray a sense of Englishness? In many ways she discovered that dress sense had a remarkably localised sense of style, in which often minute conventions of dress code – down to the level of a particular pattern in tweed cloth - were adhered to rigorously.
Jennifer Anyan's installation mimics many of the styles of museological display. Images have been enlarged to the point of degradation and reduced quality – the result of elevating images originally taken on a mobile phone and intended for very different purposes. Once again, the poor quality of the images and manner of their acquisition references popular celebrity magazines. By using a combination of images, text and objects presented in display cabinets the artist refers to a mode of presentation utilised by historical museums, but with many of the devices of much contemporary design presentation and fashion outlets.
1 Dick Hebdige Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge. 1979