Leesa Streifler

Larger than life, eye-searingly bright and viscerally drawn, the works in “She is Present” are a pantheon of demigoddesses, Gorgons, the monstrous feminine and the looming horror of old age and death. Visitors in the Dunlop Art Gallery, in comparison, appear small and drab, diminished before these powerful images.

Perhaps the copy of Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror that I tucked under my arm for a visit to the exhibition was a talisman to ward off the sensation of being reduced by the sheer scale of these drawings. Not confined to the page, female figures sprawl across multiple sheets of translucent, skin-thin YUPO paper. They take up space; they are calculatedly disorderly.

While Leesa Streifler speaks of the pleasure she derives from creating something broken and imperfect and optimistically explains the accumulation of sheets as a patchwork of life’s experiences, there is another, troubling, interpretation of this formal device. The disjointed, unreal, blank ground upon which Streifler draws conforms to the space Kristeva describes as surrounding “the deject.” Figures are isolated and detached from the contexts of place, work, family and friends that give a life meaning.

Streifler turns the events and realities of life—children, ovaries, words and the non-human companions of the aged, such as dogs, books and blankets—into burdensome appendages and haunting apparitions. The artist’s preparation of her drawing medium is revealing: an oil stick is pared with a knife to expose its soft core, startling it into the sharpness needed to make these images. A vigorous collision of strokes coalesces into a fractured self-image wrought by time: the self as we envision ourselves and the self as we are— sagging, wrinkled, simultaneously fragile and flabby. At other times her touch is elegiac; she dissolves the pigment into a weak, drippy veil, a tender shield from invading gazes. “I was trained to draw beauty,” she explains. “I wasn’t trying to find the beauty in the aging body.”

With Kristeva’s Freud-infused feminism in my hand, I feel up to Streifler’s work. I selected Powers of Horror from the midden of academic tomes swept out of the artist’s studio when she retired from the University of Regina and returned to Winnipeg to care for her aging mother. I view this as evidence that Powers of Horror has informed Streifler’s practice in the past and continues to do so.

In her much-lauded body of work “Normal” from the late 1990s, Streifler scrawled over photographs of her body, revising her contours, editing and defacing her appearance, reinventing herself as a new creature, and appending the words “I used to be a woman, but it was too hard, so now I’m a bird” to one memorable image.

One drawing from this exhibition, Belief, 2022, is a visceral reminder that it is still “too hard” to be a woman, especially an old woman. Penetrating as an X-ray, Streifler bares this woman to the bones. An exquisite corpse assembled by psychological needs, the drawing boasts five breasts. Two are small and round as balled fists, nearly obliterated with layered arcs of tar-black pigment. The other breasts hang pendulously to her navel or, ungovernable, flop to one side. Below the waist, garments that once buttressed femininity with their symbolic power are hollow and exposing: the empty bell jar shape of a skirt, the outline of an apron and a panty-shaped silhouette that frames a scribble of scant pubic hair and a labial cleft. Her torso is fringed with tabs like those that hold illustrations of frilly dresses to the bodies of paper dolls, turning this battered female figure into a child’s plaything to be dressed and undressed in its slack skin and brittle bones. Flourishes like this reveal Streifler’s understanding of the abject—the unwelcome acknowledgement that neither childhood nor science can save us from death.

The immensity and energy of Streifler’s drawings suggest that women draw vitality from the experiences that carry them closer to death. Blanket, 2024, is markedly different. An old lady, painted in diluted grey, almost disappearing, is neatly contained within a rectangle of paper. Like the binding of a quilt, a pink border doubly encloses the small figure, incarcerated by comforts furnished for its crumbling body.

Undoubtedly this image emerged from Streifler’s recent and painful experience of watching her mother’s decline and caring for her. The insubstantial body is inseparable from and secondary to its supports: the spoked hub of a wheelchair and the coloured squares of a blanket draped over her lap. The quilt patches appear like bricks in a wall. It is as if this stultifying accretion of fabric has weighed the figure down to the bottom of the page. The blankness around her becomes heavy and portentous with the isolation and detachment that define the elderly condition.

Power, 2022, on the other hand, reveals the artist’s dissatisfaction with depicting composite fantasy women whose awkward glamour collapses into stringy, flaccid figures and a nightmarish profusion of features and signifiers. The serious cast of her mouth, eyes that bore into you and arms akimbo all speak her name: Power. A tattoo twines across her shoulders and neck, below which her heart adorns her chest like a jewel. Her turquoise hair streams heroically, like the flag of a sovereign country-of-one. She is the antidote.

On another visit to the gallery, I encountered a friend, a woman with vibrantly dyed hair and a sacred heart tattooed on her throat. The last time I met her in this gallery, she told me about her hysterectomy; this time, she told me a story about Power. Streifler, with her typical exuberance, pointed at my friend, then at Power, and declared, “This is YOU!”

It feels good to be seen. Streifler acknowledges that the invisibility of post-menopausal White women motivated her to create this work. In her exhibition she makes them horribly, wonderfully present. ❚

“Leesa Streifler: She is Present” was organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, in partnership with the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, Moose Jaw. It was on exhibition at Dunlop Art Gallery from June 29, 2024, to September 11, 2024.

Sandee Moore is a White settler cis-woman whose artworks have been exhibited across Canada and internationally. She earned her BFA (Honours) from the University of Victoria and MFA in Intermedia from the University of Regina. Moore has worked as an arts administrator, writer and university instructor in Winnipeg (MB), Surrey (BC) and Regina (SK).