Tearing up Vogue and Mining the Detritus

An exhibition of practice-based doctoral research by Ehryn Torrell, Martin Hall Exhibition Space, Loughborough University, 2-10 May 2024.

Vogue and Teen Vogue are mass media that create and circulate photographs of women that hold cultural status and economic power and contribute to the politics of representation. Montage is an intermedium that falls “between media” and resists categorisation (Higgins, 1965). Through practice-based doctoral research in montage, I seek to literally, not just theoretically, tear apart fashion magazines to challenge their status and meaning.

This exhibition displays my practice-based response to the following questions: how can montage allow an artist researcher to deconstruct and challenge the racialised and gendered bodies represented in Vogue magazines? What methods of montage might be used? Does using a fashion magazine as source material risk giving voice to already dominant or normative images of women?

As source material, I have selected eight Vogue and Teen Vogue magazines produced between 1968-2017 in France, the US, and Italy. To ‘read’ them, I have created a two-step montage method where I work with one magazine at a time. I begin by leafing through the magazine, glancing at each page to find imagery to tear out. To challenge the legibility of Vogue, I choose imagery that is not easily recognisable when torn away from the source. Each image fragment is glued onto a piece of paper as they are torn out. I join them together on the paper by formal similarities, such as a line that follows another line. They form an abstract composition that I have called ‘primary montage.’ When the primary montage is complete, I return to the used magazine to mine the detritus. This allows me to discover what I have called 'secondary montage' – montage made by chance. By mining the detritus, I can find out what impact I have made on the source. The detritus of process is not part of the discourse or canon of art and rarely, if ever, theorised.

My montage method allows me to examine what I do with mass media once it is in my hands and refuses to ignore the untidy bits left behind as detritus. Through my use of the tear and its destabilisation of figure and ground relations in the magazines, the primary and secondary montage on display here offer new and distinct readings of Vogue. Holding space for tension, stillness, and possibility, my doctoral research aims to contribute to discourses on art, montage, representation, and feminist ways of making, thinking, and doing.

Ehryn Torrell is an artist and practice-based PhD candidate in International Relations, Politics and History (IRPH) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. Her research sits within the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Visual Culture. She gratefully acknowledges support in part by funding from the CDT and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada.