Chey's Tattoo
Dita Angeles
- Sitter: Cheyanne Byron
- Medium: Archival digital print
- Dimensions: 51 x 102 cm
- Representation: The artist represents themselves
- Category: Sylvia Jones Prize for Women Artists, Accenture Digital Awards
About the artwork
Dita Angeles presents Cheyanne Byron in a stack composition inspired by Edo warrior block prints. Byron uses a traditional Japanese tebori method to tattoo a very Anglo “mum” on her willing victim. Pain, trust, dominance, and perversion are themes in this depiction of Byron leaving her mark.
About the sitter
Cheyanne Byron is super-female, with a notorious sense of creativity and an endearing fascination for the curiously morbid. She has strong ambitions to become a tattoo artist and taxidermist, and currently works as an assistant at Wild At Heart Tattoo.
About the artist
Dita Angeles is from New Zealand, though lived in Asia for her entire adult life. She has been creating portraits for 18 years, and believes that people are more interesting than they are. Her oil paintings and photographs capture the likeness of her subjects, and use fantasy to realise their ambience.
“She is an archetype, and the composition flows through a procedure of allure, pain, and imminent clean-up with tissues.”
Behind the scenes
Chey, tattoo-clad with stalking fauna, imposes a traditional Japanese technique on her prey with a kitsch “Mum” heart tattoo, which, combined with the inevitability of the male gaze, also brings something oedipal in the mix.
She responds to that gaze with adversary eyes. Her femininity is arresting, inescapable and stupefying. Thus she imprints her pacified subjects, perverting their bodies indelibly. The process, just as current now as it has been throughout history and culture.
She is an archetype, and the composition flows through a procedure of allure, pain, and imminent clean-up with tissues.
