Barbspotting

Barbspotting - By Tiffany Duong

Artwork# 16

About the Artist

Name: Tiffany Duong

School: OCAD University

Program: Drawing and Painting

Location: Toronto & Mississauga, Ontario

Artist Bio: Tiffany Duong (b. 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator based in Toronto and Mississauga. She graduated from OCAD University this year with a BFA in Drawing and Painting and a Minor in Illustration.
In her practice, Tiffany conjures bratty, absurdist, and humorous images that investigate her experiences of girlhood and womanhood. Through themes of femininity, nostalgia, and rage, she subverts patriarchal expectations and invites viewers into the impulses of her psyche - using the familiarity of culturally familiar iconography to tap into the uncensored malevolence of the human consciousness. Her work is informed by low-brow art, film, pop culture, and the whimsy of fairy-tales.

Tiffany works with an analog, mixed-media approach that merges the playfulness of childhood drawing methods with refined painting techniques. She specializes in small-scale paintings, invoking childhood feelings of curiosity and preciousness.

About the Artwork

Medium: Painting

Size: 20”H x 16"W x 0.5”D

Artistic Statement: "Barbspotting," part of her Into the Dollhouse series, explores the patriarchal conditions that impact the transition from girlhood to womanhood, centering on the suppression of socially unacceptable behaviours and emotions that lead to a disconnect with the self. With Barbie as a vessel for her consciousness, Tiffany merges hyperbolic examples of pretend play scenarios and pop culture iconography - using the inconsequential, imaginary nature of play to confront the oppression of her current reality whilst creating a new vision of the female self portrait.