David Krut Publishing,
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by Tegan Bristow

Bronwyn Millar is a painter who explores her subject – herself – through interactions on social networking sites. Millar’s current explorations on Second Life are on the Digital Surrogates exhibition at David Krut Projects from the 11th of October to the 17th of November. Millar’s work will be shown with portraits from Second Life by renowned New York-based Italian internet artists Eva and Franco Mattes, and South African Pippa Stalker’s photographs of ‘people’ she has ‘killed’ in Grand Theft Auto.

Rather than addressing Millar’s painting I look, in the context of Digital Surrogates, at her responses to and integration of social networking sites in the exploration of alter egos and the creation of digital avatars. I have found that her exploration of avatars and fake personas not only reveals stereotypical behaviour on social networking sites but is a light-hearted revelation of what digital avatars can mean and represent for almost anybody.

Bronwyn Millar uses only herself as her painting subject. Previously Millar painted self-portraits but in 2006, in preparation for her second solo exhibition at Obert Contemporary, she began to explore alter egos of herself. These Millar describes as essentially the women she could have become had she made different choices in the very real experiences offered to her in life. For Millar, these are an exploration of an inner self – the parts known only to Bronwyn.

She began the search for her alter egos through makeup and dressing up. Makeup, Millar believes, is about masking and disguising what needs to be hidden from the outside world. Yet despite her statement about disguise, Millar uses the device of cosmetic masking and masquerading to explore hidden versions of herself, as a means to reveal her so-called alter egos rather than hide aspects of herself.

While preparing for her 2006 show, she created two distinct personas. Using herself as the model through which these personas were revealed, Millar introduced two versions of herself to the world. Both are stereotypical women in the South African Johannesburg context; women who obscure their true selves behind their cosmetic getup. The first is a bimbo named Skye, a long-haired blonde who is somewhat vacant and is described by Millar as a ‘model trophy wife’. Skye is married to a cheating husband but she too may be having an affair – a fact never substantiated by Millar. The second is a dark-haired, white-faced Goth named Morgianna who revels in thoughts of vampires and morbid sexual fantasies, but her real self hides behind a well-constructed mask.

Before painting these alter egos, Millar explored them in an act of (undocumented) performance. She would dress up as these personas and literally take them out shopping or go about mundane tasks she felt they might ordinarily engage in. After this she would photograph herself as these characters in preparation for painting.

A second ‘taking out’ activity in which Millar engaged these personas was to create profiles for them on the online social networking sites MySpace and DatingBuzz (a South African dating site). On these sites she was plagued by fans and soon started to explore her alter egos more fully. The online world became a place in which she felt she could have a relationship and see how others responded and ‘reached out’ to her persona, testing limits she ordinarily would not push and finding responses to her persona’s looks she would never ordinarily (as Bronwyn) have received. Millar reports that Skye received 187 letters and 900 views within twenty-four hours, a fact that completely astounded her but also made her doubt the sincerity of the senders and the social networking aspects of the internet.

Engaging in these internet relationships affected Millar’s approach to the exploration of her personas and her work, to the extent that the explorations of her personal alter egos became highly objectified and no longer very personal. Still Millar sees this experience as an experiment with herself and she regards the use of internet-based, social networking spaces as fundamental to her practice.

When asked why she chose such stereotypical representations of her alter egos, Millar described a situation in which a layer of engagement needed to be created. She states that while she sought to understand people’s responses to her new persona, she also knew that the alter ego’s stereotypical nature would elicit stereotypical responses; in essence, she created a layer around herself that was easy to unpack and come to terms with. Despite the naive character development, for Millar, the alter egos and the online spaces represent a world in which everything is defined with regard to norms, where it is easier to respond to stereotypes than to the subtle nuances of fuller personalities.

In her latest work, unsurprisingly, what is being revealed – as she creates and explores two new alter egos – is Millar’s own difficulty with her personality pitched against societal norms. This time Millar uses the social networking and virtual environment of Second Life in order to ‘take out’ her new personas. This site is quite different from MySpace and DatingBuzz, as rather than profile photos, digital avatars are created for a 3-D virtual environment in which real things happen and people explore not only each other as avatars but as virtual physical beings. The two new personas created by Millar and explored in Second Life are Bridgette Villiers and Perfect Bronwyn.

Bridgette Villiers, Millar claims, in comparison to Skye and Morgianna, is a little more like Millar herself, but she describes Bridgette as being very ordinary: she is plain looking and has straight, dowdy hair; she tries not to stand out and she does not want to be noticed. All Bridgette wants to do is fit in; she is attractive but plays down her looks in order to do this. Millar says that Bridgette comes from Facebook, another social networking site aimed at networking between friends and acquaintances. Millar claims that Bridgette is the old school friend she could have become. Bridgette represents the woman whose profile photo is her wedding photo. Bridgette’s measure of success is the ‘normal’ dream – happiness is defined for her according to this standard: what is most important to her is that she is married and her husband is successful. Bridgette forces normality upon herself as a measure but, as Millar states, it does not suit Bridgette and she is actually very unhappy.

Perfect Bronwyn, on the other hand, is (in respect of artistic practice) a direct response to the possibilities offered in Second Life and a return to painting her own body. Unlike Bridgette, Morgianna and Skye, Perfect Bronwyn looks like Millar but is what Millar perceives to be a perfect version of herself. Millar created Perfect Bronwyn when playing with Bridgette on Second Life. In order to create Bridgette, Millar had to create Bridgette’s body based on her own and then add aspects like ‘bags’ on the hips to more closely represent her own body. It was at this point that Perfect Bronwyn was born, a perfect model made in comparison to the real Bronwyn. For the very first time Millar had someone to compare herself against rather than someone to reveal from within.

I find Perfect Bronwyn amusing. When asked who this persona is, Millar states that Perfect Bronwyn is how Millar would feel if she were “totally happy and did not want for anything.” This is the version of Bronwyn Millar that is “fit and never ever gets headaches or feels sad; she is graceful and elegant, she is never bothered by anyone, never says anything stupid, never tells dirty jokes and is completely stress-free”. Perfect Bronwyn is literally an embodiment of a perfect version of the artist – she is fit, healthy, happy, content, sexy and confident; a version of Millar that can only be ‘taken out’ in Second Life and is less a stereotypical persona than a dehumanisation of herself: a cover girl found on the front of a women’s magazine.

What is more amusing, however, is that with the creation of Perfect Bronwyn, Bridgette, who is also a Second Life persona, got played with less and less. As Millar states “I’ve fallen into playing with Perfect Bronwyn more and less with Bridgette who is fat and shy”. Where Second Life and Perfect Bronwyn will take Millar in the exploration of self and her creative practice can only be guessed at, but what I do know is that Second Life, like MySpace and Dating Buzz, has shifted and affected Millar’s artistic practice and her approach to the subject of herself. This time it has happened through a strangely more profound look at herself through a shallower version created in 3-D. Perfection through Perfect Bronwyn is not a social stereotype but the idea of a headache-free, stress-free, confident life.

Keywords: Art Gallery, Artists, Arts-and-Culture, digital-surrogates, News