Take Home an Exclusive Erica Eyres Print

A woman lies on the ground talking on an old-fashioned rotary dial phone. She’s just wearing a shirt, which has ridden up to reveal her knickers and suspenders. It’s an odd anachronistic image, straddling the borderline between uncomfortably revealing and sly comedy. All of which makes it typical of the subversively funny work of Canadian artist Erica Eyres.

Often using images culled from fetish magazines of the 1970s and ’80s as the source material for her drawings, Eyres has a very definite set of criteria that she’s hunting for. “I’m looking for eye contact between the subject and the viewer,” she explained in an interview with Elephant. “Also the pose, that awkwardness, a certain amount of amateur quality, where they’re mimicking a pose that they’ve seen before, but there’s something subtle which makes it obvious it’s not a professional model.”

Drawing on images which are light years away from the slick professional gloss of modern soft porn, Eyres gives these amateur images a degree of self-mocking gravitas by rendering them as line-art sketches. “They acquire a heavier emotional impact; they’re in black and white, heavy and kind of carved out,” she says. “I look for them to not be slick, unlike the way that images are now where the bodies are so controlled. I enjoy images of different types of bodies that aren’t photoshopped or held in difficult, ridiculous positions.”