Deadpan Drama: Erica Eyres’ Art of Surreal Subjectivity

In Learn to Dance, artist Erica Eyres’ latest satirical video work, four female characters embark on a deeply unsettling eighteen-minute journey to self-empowerment through dance. Against a tacky geometric backdrop reminiscent of low-budget 80s TV sets, the mock-serious instructor Nicole begins by asking her participants what brought them to the class. Jenny confides that lately, she’s “constantly worried that other people are judging me,” and knows that self-confidence is essential to “get ahead in life.” Angela admits, with a halting chuckle, that “most days, I feel like I’m a hole in the ground.” The fourth character, Nicole’s ambiguous “colleague” Claire, simply stands off to the side, staring into the middle distance and offering something between a smile and a grimace from time to time. Playing all four roles in wigs and ill-advised 80s outfits, Eyres’ preternatural instincts for the cringe-worthy and absurd are on full display. 

As she narrates her personal story of overcoming anxiety and self-alienation, Nicole encourages her students to follow suit and find self-confidence via the liberatory potential of dance—specifically, as it turns out, badly performed, painfully slow, pseudo-sexual dance moves. But first, they must progress through the “mirror phase,” if they’re ever going to bring their “symbolic dance into real life,” a loose riff on Jacque Lacan’s “mirror stage” as the foundational moment of rift between self and other. Speaking with what Eyres has called the “estranged voice,” based on German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s “distancing effect,”¹ Nicole brings a surprisingly detached flavour to her radical project of self-actualization. 

Taking up quotes from Lacan for Beginners, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and a found VHS tape called Learn to Lapdance², Learn to Dance blends the jargon of self-help, psychoanalysis, and female pathos to increasingly surreal and bizarre effect. Eager to please their passive-aggressive instructor, the students sway and touch themselves self-consciously in silence, occasionally breaking the fourth wall with a faltering smile.

The result is both hilarious and excruciating. Eyres manages to skewer vapid tropes of self-optimization culture in ways that feel both nostalgic and eerily current, while slowly bringing us to the edge of an almost existential unease. The video revels in its playful surrealism, even as it dredges up discomfiting questions about gender, sexuality and the artifice of social performance simmering just below the surface. 

This, it seems, is classic Erica Eyres—leaving us both helplessly amused and unsettled in some ineffable way, simultaneously drawn in and alienated. In Eyres’ world, the tragicomic reigns, and something is always thrillingly off. 

Eyres is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, installation and video. Based in Glasgow since 2004, she was born and raised in Winnipeg, and her work often takes up forgotten cultural memorabilia from her upbringing in the 80s and 90s. Employing deadpan humour and self-consciously amateur aesthetics, she uses this nostalgic imagery to probe and unsettle social constructions related to femininity, heterosexuality, and class. 

Eyres credits Winnipeg as a major influence on her off-kilter aesthetics, citing the mix of casual and surrealist sensibilities and “strange characters” that make up the city’s enigmatic personality.³ At the well-attended opening of “Dancing for Dummies,” a solo exhibition of Eyres’ work at the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices in the city last winter (her first in many years), it was clear that the relationship is reciprocal. There was a strong sense of welcoming home a beloved paragon of Winnipeg weirdness. Attendees seemed generally delighted by her work’s irreverent use of the standard white-walled space. Someone told me they had a great chat with the artist’s mom, and I found out shortly after that my borrowed pottery wheel originally belonged to Eyres. For an artist who left twenty years ago, the mutual indebtedness and ongoing rapport between Eyres and the city felt striking, but maybe not surprising. She still returns to Winnipeg frequently, and as anyone who lives here likes to remind you, it never really changes. In this way, despite her work’s self-conscious nostalgia, she captures something timeless about the self-deprecation and gritty eccentricity of this place. 

Personal narrative may haunt Eyres’ work then, but she never allows us to settle into any neat autobiographical interpretation. Though she makes use of experiences from her own life or people she’s known, her gifts for narrative slipperiness and ironic distance render this relationship dynamic rather than static. A video or painting might allude to some kernel of lived experience, but its fictionalized melodrama ultimately serves more to challenge than appease our interpretive gaze. By playing with the gaps in what an audience can know of an artist, and the biased distortions of memory, she slyly problematizes any notion of subjective truth. In fact, she seems to relish letting us grasp for meaning until we eventually implicate ourselves in the process, drawing on our own affective associations and emotional entanglements. 

Or, perhaps, it’s less a challenge and more an invitation to partake in her intuitive approach, where narrative is constructed and contested after the fact. Eyres’ work typically starts with some kind of cultural reference or object—porn magazines, beauty manuals, VHS videos, or embarrassing vintage touchstones like the For Dummies book series—but the specific content of the images is often less important than their sensibility. She seeks imagery with an “emotional pull” for her that sparks some sense of identification. As she put it recently, “I’m looking for awkwardness.”⁴

Choosing these images instinctively, Eyres then pries them away from the reference material through iterative editorial processes of scanning, cropping, and resizing to create a particular affect.⁵ If it’s a video, she starts with something she wants to mimic, maybe a style of speech, and lets the idea evolve organically, before filming repetitively until she’s satisfied.⁶ But it’s only when the work is finished that its meaning really starts to seep out and reveal itself. At this point, she might lean into or rebuff possible narrative resonances between various pieces. But “quite often,” she admits, a work “reveals something personal that I didn’t intend to.”⁷ This vulnerable moment of interpretive surprise or even failure becomes mutually shared by artist and viewer. Caught up in the work’s almost-cathartic awkwardness, we’re all left wondering about our own unreliable subjectivity and what repressed parts of the self might accidentally be spilling over in public.

If Eyres taps into some kind of universal experience of an incoherent, estranged self, she also seems to be preoccupied with the subjectivity of a particular kind of hapless, tortured, straight white woman. Women feature predominantly in Eyres’ portraits and video work, and many of her ceramics take up archetypical artifacts from a middle-class female adolescence. In her painted portraits from vintage porn magazines, the models stare back with an inscrutable mix of knowingness and naivete. Hints of boredom, doubt, or bemusement play on their faces, and they consistently fail to convince us of their status as objects of desire ripe for male consumption. Even their nudity is carnivalesque, veering more toward ridiculous than erotic. The portraits of “before” images taken from beauty manuals similarly capture an irrepressible weirdness that you know could never be eradicated by a better haircut.

In these pieces, the male gaze feels curiously absent, abstracted and unevenly internalized rather than a “real” force of subjection. Instead, we sense that the psychosexual dynamic is between the woman and herself, and here we are, interrupting a disarmingly brave yet underwhelming performance of sexual self-assurance for the void. In this way, Eyres confronts us with the artifice of heterosexuality and derails any assumed vectors of desire. We can’t help but think of John Berger’s observation that “women watch themselves being looked at…the surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.”⁸

Part of what makes this internal drama so compelling is Eyres’ focus on the banal and everyday. The women in these pieces are amateurs, striving and failing to perform their prescribed social roles and inadvertently revealing the absurd construction of these categories. Yet, even if they occupy some kind of cultural backwater and no one’s really watching, they’re clearly on a rich subjective journey that cannot be dismissed. Such women don’t usually generate such fervent curiosity, but Eyres is attuned to something like the pseudo-sacred, or at least delightfully strange, in the feminine profane. 

Although women’s damaged psyches may be an easy target, Eyres doesn’t default to cruelty in her satire. She also seems disinterested in any simplistic feminist commentary or redemption arc. Instead, she confronts us with the irreducible fact of full-blown subjectivity, as warped as it might be by, say, patriarchy and capitalism, and encourages us to enjoy the implosion of social expectations these failed performers and models accidentally offer.

Maybe that’s easier to do with cultural leftovers from a few decades ago which benefit from the gloss of nostalgia, but Eyres’ work also resonates obliquely with the contemporary moment. Exploring the cultural manifestations of a neoliberal turn to individualism and self-help in the 80s and 90s, she attunes us to the psychological coping mechanisms and delusional aspirations that continue to sustain us in truly late capitalism. Through the campy aesthetics of Nicole and her aspiring class, performance art robot Anne 2.0’s hilariously dead-eyed but breathless monologue about shopping at Costco with your mom before closing,⁹ or Eyres’ eerily realistic ceramic representations of the For Dummies series—shorthand for a quintessential 90s optimism that we can tackle any problem, no matter how complex, on our own—the message is almost easier to receive. Meanwhile, self-destruction, the seedy underbelly of misguided self-improvement, is never far away. Eyres’ glossy ceramics of half-smoked cigarettes dangling from ashtrays, and fast food and sodas seen in exhibitions like “Family Meal” (2022) invite us to consider the ways the two are inextricably linked, our disordered cravings playing out erratically in the domestic and public spheres.

If the thwarted desires Eyres so capably portrays fall into a dynamic of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism,¹⁰ the artist finds ways to mine the affective possibilities of this relationship rather than dwelling on its deadends. Her virtuoso ceramics are at once lifeless caricatures of the debris of our impulsive, cheap consumption, as well as objects of high art, playfully redeemed through perfect rendering. Her video works are often devastating sendups of our most familiar, denigrated genres—reality TV, sitcoms, infomercials—made to feel haunting and unreal, undermining our sense of control. Consistently, she lets us swing back and forth between recognition and alienation without landing somewhere definitive. While we’re wincing at performance art robot Anne 2.0 waiting blank-faced until her next performance request, or willing Angela to find her way out of the “mirror phase,” we’re also kind of laughing (painfully) at ourselves. If you’re doing it right, Nicole reminds us, “the difference between yourself and others is put radically into question.”

It’s hard not to appreciate this dedicated attention to the discarded, bizarre, lightly pathetic cultural flotsam that’s been relegated to the corners of our psyches or our parents’ basements. Eyres shows us there’s much here to mine, keeping us alert to the mysterious processes of social production and the weird, never-ending dance of constructing the self. 

Gabrielle Willms is a writer currently based in Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg.

1. Erica Eyres, “Artist Profile: Erica Eyres,” Central Stn, February 18, 2015, https://thisiscentralstation.com/artist-profile/artist-profile-erica-eyres/.
2. Erica Eyres, “Info for BlackFlash Profile,” email response to Gabrielle Willms, October 25, 2024.
3. Paul Carey-Kent, “Erica Eyres: Uncanny Deconstructions,” Border Crossings, May 2015, https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/erica-eyress-uncanny-deconstructions.
4. Rubén Palma, “Erica Eyres on Her Art, Nostalgia, Life, Creative Process and More,” Overstandard, May 15, 2024, https://overstandard.dk/erica-eyres-on-her-art-nostalgia-life-creative-process-and-more/
5. Palma, “Erica Eyres.”
6. Eyres, “Info for BlackFlash Profile,” October 25, 2024.
7. Palma,”Erica Eyres.”
8. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 47.
9. Anne 2.0 (2018) is a video that promotes the new and improved performance art robot Anne 2.0, designed to deliver live performance art from the comfort of your home. When you’re done with Anne, whose expressionless delivery of soul-crushing content about banal suburban consumerism made me laugh out loud, you can hide her in a closet or give her her own bedroom where she will stare blankly at the ceiling.
10. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),1-14. According to Berlant, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” And yet, optimism is a site of “negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable.”

This article is published in issue 41.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue