Elizabeth

Claude Perreault's Elizabeth explores the artist's long-standing fascination with glamour, while playfully subverting idealized representations within celebrity culture. Elizabeth enacts a complex train of mediated signification. Perreault has chosen to revisit Queen Elizabeth I through cinema and television portrayals by celebrity actors (such as Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love or Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth). At first glance, Perreault's portraits might appear to be expertly-crafted oil paintings, but closer inspection reveals each picture plane to be entirely comprised of collaged erotic images from gay magazines. Displaying an inspiring sense of humour and incredible technical precision, Perreault provokes reconsiderations of the construction and functions of desire within contemporary society.