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‘It’s all about keepin’ it real.’
Cecilia Stenbom indicates the degree of detail and historical accuracy that went into her design for a replica Vietnam War-era machine gun, fastidiously fashioned from paint and fibreboard. It barely exceeds the second dimension, which is right where her work belongs – skimming the surface of things, claiming superficiality as her battlefield. In Search and Destroy (2006), she insists that you have to be married to your rifle in Vietnam, but she goes without the weapon during the Northumbrian reconnaissance mission documented in that video. Seemingly, she left the rifle behind in the gallery space outside the television monitor’s assertive frame, where its lapsed existence alongside her really-quite-real combat helmet is somehow more convincing: as art, as fantasy derived from history gleaned from film.
Where fact proves stranger than fiction, Stenbom establishes the grounds for contending both, mobilizing an army of umbrellas for a rainy day – drawing allows her this self-perpetuation, this multiplication of the masses uniformed in the patterns and stripes that serve as camouflage against the barcode, or are simply the consequence of bad fashion sense. The shoplifting of objects from the realm of the everyday in the interest of building fictions is a common enough visual tactic in our material-rich today, but a more ambiguous transformation takes place when the real-world functions of those objects are potentially fictive in themselves. We do not necessarily trust in the dubious celebrity culture and miracle cures that so enchant Stenbom, but a child-like challenge of the double-dog-dare variety is afoot here, and so, equally stubborn, we swallow down the difficult pill of those parts of the world too ludicrous to be believed, only to be caught by her game, realizing we should have gone for truth instead of any dare at all. This element of risk sets up an expectation of failure but also triggers, with hopeful expectation, all those possible lives created by a dizzying variety of material choice: an alternate reality to match every available colour of iPod, each triggering a new soundtrack and personality towards self-reinvention.
But this excess of options proves to be deceptive when all these products and instant remedies point to the single monolithic need for perfection. This is the quest that Stenbom, in her heroic narcissism, has been pursuing since her early training as a traditional painter; with the development of necessary skill, she has since been burning the excess body fat from her practice. A minimalist’s love for precise delineations, or perhaps her native Swedish love for Ikea’s bright consumer-friendly tidiness, has progressively sharpened the formal impact of her drawings, projecting her images within an empty space of possibility, for herself as well as her audience. This process could continue until she hits size zero – the new zero wherein her morning-after dose of Resolve has won her absolution for the blunders of a drunken night-before, wiping the slate of memory clean.
Then again, even this holistic personality wears thin, necessitating yet another alter ego: the physicality and humour of Stenbom’s practice always erases the dull edge from such a tasteless nullification. The performance of something as peaceful as downward-facing dog, as unapologetically aggressive as martial arts, treads a tauntingly taut tightrope strung along by Stenbom’s chameleon-like personality. Her characters may share a common incredible standard of living (and a similar preference for dogs as the household pet of choice), yet they operate across multiple spheres of worldly influence, on the strong side of skill or just stepping over to the wrong side of the law. In all her transformations, her knack for play of the most aggressive sort brings the performance back to the sort of self-awareness easily recognized once more in the introspection of yoga: the quest for self-definition, for the articulation of a role within a popular universe.
In The Inspector (2007), Stenbom’s adoption of a police detective persona seems a fitting figure given the nature of her quest; in this and all her recent videos the performance is the product of a close examination of media archetypes and survives as a clear expository monument to the fantasy alter ego, made clear by carefully worded voice-overs for easy listening. Counter to this transparent search for truth, her use of names that obfuscate rather than identify the subjects of her drawings – the cast of Dallas rendered as exotic fish in Life in the Glassbox (2006) or the familiar pet-names documenting her gadgets in Colleagues (2006) – casts a subtle netting over this fishbowl mentality. These idiosyncratic moments are reminders that, despite the common currency of Stenbom’s imagination and desires, the curiosities revealed are uniquely and minutely hers. She is the heroine of her own world, and she understands what’s at stake in this private stake-out against the hyperreal – the equipment of her espionage justified, this remedy-riddled idol with her fully loaded paper gun.
Stephanie Vegh, 2007
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