Tyza Stewart

Tyza Stewart was born in Moura, Queensland in 1990. Stewart’s practice explores gender identity through an art practice based in continual self-portraiture. The artist uses documentation and memories from childhood along with more current experiences to inform an interrogation of understandings of normality in relation to gender. Resulting self-portraits depict ambiguously gendered selves that publicly fail to conform to gender norms. By both resisting and engaging with popular understandings of transsexual narratives, Stewart highlights alternatives to the strict binary understandings of gender that constantly proliferate within society. Stewart’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions in Australia, including ‘Garden’, QUT Art Museum, ‘15 artists’, Redcliffe Art Gallery, ‘The Churchie’, Griffith University Art Gallery, ‘Breakthrough’, Gympie Regional Art Gallery, ‘Interstate Romance, Pseudo Space’, Sydney and ‘BEAF 2013’, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane. Stewart’s work is represented in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, University of Queensland Art Museum, Griffith University Art Collection, Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital. The artist’s work featured in GOMA Q. Contemporary Queensland Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art.

Tyza Stewart explores gender identity. In Sport Sequence 2016, Stewart continues the discipline of self-portraiture to question gender normality. The resulting self-portraits are tentative and ambiguously gendered. They resist gender conformity. Stewart highlights alternatives to the binary structure of gender, making us sharply aware of way the norms of gender are constructed in our society.

Sport Sequence
2016
Oil on panel
120.3 x 45.2 cm
Courtesy of Heiser Gallery
view at The Happy Cabin
58 Vulture St
West End
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