Bio
London-born, self-taught artist Siena Barnes’ ink pop drawings are rooted in a rebellious punk spirit.
Elegant and obscene, her celebration of iconography and provocative slogans address issues of gender and sexuality in contemporary society.
Examples of her work can be found in the Tom of Finland Foundation collection, Trebuchet Magazine, Adbusters and BBC Radio 4.
She continues to create sell out collaborations with Japanese fashion legends Hysteric Glamour, hits the studio every day and exhibits internationally.
About the artwork
Siena Barnes’ ink drawings celebrate queer icons who, like goddesses, challenge the status quo and take up more space than society would care to permit.
The work riffs on camp, defined in “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural”, where authenticity is revealed through artifice.
As notions of the feminine evolve, the Venusian ideal expands, fucking with societal gender norms to include the stars of Ru Paul’s drag Race, non binary beauties and proto pop idol Liz Taylor.
In the vein of Velazquez’s “The Toilet of Venus,” notions of the gaze are complicated by the internet with content creators behind and in front of the lens. Who is looking at who?
The artist reclaims her body through drawing subjects who return the gaze, in a contest of power. They challenge relational femininity — or the idea that the feminine is only alive in the eyes of the male gaze — and present an emboldened blend of grrl power.
Siena Barnes by Philippa Snow
The same day I sat down to write about Siena Barnes’ work, an influencer had gone viral on the internet for being photographed pulling her hazmat suit down at Chernobyl, exposing her ass. In light of life now imitating the specific kind of art most often found in Ballard novels, films by David Cronenberg, and the alarmist techno-melodrama of Black Mirror, commenting on the juxtaposition of opposing good-bad forces in news or in commerce is almost impossible to do with grace. Eroticism meets with violence daily; advertising and the promise of eventual annihilation, always easy bedfellows, now seem to be in a monogamous life-partnership.
A Google search for “dystopia” produces a little over forty-two million results. I am meant to believe that a woman taking one last Uber job en route to giving birth is an inspiring example of the work ethic of modern freelancers, and I am supposed to believe that the model-activist Emily Ratajkowski — who once appeared on film smearing her entirely flawless body with spaghetti bolognaise while wearing lingerie, for feminism — cannot wait for us to “stop confusing shitty capitalism with feminism, thanks,” according to her Instagram account.
When life becomes unsatirisable, the smartest artists lean in rather than fall down. At first blush, Barnes’ illustrations are as logo-like and dexterously seductive as the forms they are critiquing: a nymph-girl with a wide, money-shot mouth, the blood-red slogan/strapline hollering LET’S MAKE AMERICA; a trifecta of babes, one topless and two armed, alongside the blasé announcement of ANOTHER AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING. AWESOME BRAND, another poster screams above an illustration of a soft-core model, dribbling what may or may not be cum. (Emily Ratjakowski, who might see the idea of toplessness being an AWESOME BRAND as either “shitty capitalism” or an egregious breach of copyright, would no doubt be entirely horrified.) These are advertisements for sex and death, which is to say that they are like all other advertisements as viewed through the glasses from They Live.
It is wild, now, to remember legal cigarette advertisements, which filtered something lethal through the prism of erotic promise, or to think of Page Three’s “News in Briefs,” its topless girls and fabricated philosophical opinions — “As French philosopher Voltaire observed,” Sarah from Middlesex suggests, “‘no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible’” — often situated next to serial murders, domestic attacks, terror threats, war, illuminating rape statistics. It is wild that both things, seen in retrospect, seem positively quaint.
More than the Chernobyl influencer with the perfect ass, what Barnes’ illustrations call to mind is a photograph of the singer Britney Spears in a pink t-shirt, emblazoned with the perceptive logo I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM. As a visual metaphor, it has reappeared countless times in countless things I’ve written over the last six or seven years, all circling back to its divine approximation of a boom destined to lead to an almighty crash, its almost impossible irony: taken in 2004, a little after Spears got married to her oafish backing dancer, Kevin Federline, and three years before her eventual shaven-headed breakdown, it is illustrative of a very noughties image of celebrity. Bare-faced, beaming and wearing sweatpants, Spears is the platonic ideal of a star from humble stock, a self-made millionaire whose millions owe their existence to a specific mode of marketing that prizes scandal, youth and beauty more than it does sanity or skill. Viewed retrospectively, it is also impossible not to consider the containment of her future tragedy in her front-facing statement, in her hot body itself. LET’S MAKE AMERICA, her t-shirt might have said, or AWESOME BRAND.
Like Barnes’ Indian ink drawings, the image of Spears as THE AMERICAN DREAM is both perfect advertising and a work of art, coquettish and alarming in its suggestion of violence. It is hard to imagine an image more analogous to the style or the message of her work, making it satisfying to learn — in an email correspondence with the artist — that someday she hopes to make a painting of it.
Bylines for Artforum, Sight & Sound, GARAGE and Tank magazine
Bio
London-born, self-taught artist Siena Barnes’ ink pop drawings are rooted in a rebellious punk spirit.
Elegant and obscene, her celebration of iconography and provocative slogans address issues of gender and sexuality in contemporary society.
Examples of her work can be found in the Tom of Finland Foundation collection, Trebuchet Magazine, Adbusters and BBC Radio 4.
She continues to create sell out collaborations with Japanese fashion legends Hysteric Glamour, hits the studio every day and exhibits internationally.
About the artwork
Siena Barnes’ ink drawings celebrate queer icons who, like goddesses, challenge the status quo and take up more space than society would care to permit.
The work riffs on camp, defined in “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural”, where authenticity is revealed through artifice.
As notions of the feminine evolve, the Venusian ideal expands, fucking with societal gender norms to include the stars of Ru Paul’s drag Race, non binary beauties and proto pop idol Liz Taylor.
In the vein of Velazquez’s “The Toilet of Venus,” notions of the gaze are complicated by the internet with content creators behind and in front of the lens. Who is looking at who?
The artist reclaims her body through drawing subjects who return the gaze, in a contest of power. They challenge relational femininity — or the idea that the feminine is only alive in the eyes of the male gaze — and present an emboldened blend of grrl power.
Siena Barnes by Philippa Snow
The same day I sat down to write about Siena Barnes’ work, an influencer had gone viral on the internet for being photographed pulling her hazmat suit down at Chernobyl, exposing her ass. In light of life now imitating the specific kind of art most often found in Ballard novels, films by David Cronenberg, and the alarmist techno-melodrama of Black Mirror, commenting on the juxtaposition of opposing good-bad forces in news or in commerce is almost impossible to do with grace. Eroticism meets with violence daily; advertising and the promise of eventual annihilation, always easy bedfellows, now seem to be in a monogamous life-partnership.
A Google search for “dystopia” produces a little over forty-two million results. I am meant to believe that a woman taking one last Uber job en route to giving birth is an inspiring example of the work ethic of modern freelancers, and I am supposed to believe that the model-activist Emily Ratajkowski — who once appeared on film smearing her entirely flawless body with spaghetti bolognaise while wearing lingerie, for feminism — cannot wait for us to “stop confusing shitty capitalism with feminism, thanks,” according to her Instagram account.
When life becomes unsatirisable, the smartest artists lean in rather than fall down. At first blush, Barnes’ illustrations are as logo-like and dexterously seductive as the forms they are critiquing: a nymph-girl with a wide, money-shot mouth, the blood-red slogan/strapline hollering LET’S MAKE AMERICA; a trifecta of babes, one topless and two armed, alongside the blasé announcement of ANOTHER AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING. AWESOME BRAND, another poster screams above an illustration of a soft-core model, dribbling what may or may not be cum. (Emily Ratjakowski, who might see the idea of toplessness being an AWESOME BRAND as either “shitty capitalism” or an egregious breach of copyright, would no doubt be entirely horrified.) These are advertisements for sex and death, which is to say that they are like all other advertisements as viewed through the glasses from They Live.
It is wild, now, to remember legal cigarette advertisements, which filtered something lethal through the prism of erotic promise, or to think of Page Three’s “News in Briefs,” its topless girls and fabricated philosophical opinions — “As French philosopher Voltaire observed,” Sarah from Middlesex suggests, “‘no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible’” — often situated next to serial murders, domestic attacks, terror threats, war, illuminating rape statistics. It is wild that both things, seen in retrospect, seem positively quaint.
More than the Chernobyl influencer with the perfect ass, what Barnes’ illustrations call to mind is a photograph of the singer Britney Spears in a pink t-shirt, emblazoned with the perceptive logo I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM. As a visual metaphor, it has reappeared countless times in countless things I’ve written over the last six or seven years, all circling back to its divine approximation of a boom destined to lead to an almighty crash, its almost impossible irony: taken in 2004, a little after Spears got married to her oafish backing dancer, Kevin Federline, and three years before her eventual shaven-headed breakdown, it is illustrative of a very noughties image of celebrity. Bare-faced, beaming and wearing sweatpants, Spears is the platonic ideal of a star from humble stock, a self-made millionaire whose millions owe their existence to a specific mode of marketing that prizes scandal, youth and beauty more than it does sanity or skill. Viewed retrospectively, it is also impossible not to consider the containment of her future tragedy in her front-facing statement, in her hot body itself. LET’S MAKE AMERICA, her t-shirt might have said, or AWESOME BRAND.
Like Barnes’ Indian ink drawings, the image of Spears as THE AMERICAN DREAM is both perfect advertising and a work of art, coquettish and alarming in its suggestion of violence. It is hard to imagine an image more analogous to the style or the message of her work, making it satisfying to learn — in an email correspondence with the artist — that someday she hopes to make a painting of it.
Bylines for Artforum, Sight & Sound, GARAGE and Tank magazine