The menthol series

The menthol series

Yvonne Todd bends the framework of studio photography. She manipulates its techniques and our expectations of the genre. Todd initially trained as a commercial photographer. After graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2001 with a BFA majoring in Sculpture, she went on to win the inaugural Walters Prize with a series of photographs made in her final year of study. The judge, Harald Szeemann, said her work irritated him the most.

In 1999, The Menthol Series was exhibited as part of a ‘new talent’ show at Artspace, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Across five images, Todd constructs a narrative of delectable suburban neurosis, boredom and aspiration. There is a mundane, mall-glamour to the hand of acrylics, fidgeting with a gold chain and dice charm. White carnations, a cat eying something out of frame, long extinguished birthday candles and a glass lily atop a puddle of split milk: domestic objects rendered with the clarity of forensic evidence.

Todd’s still-lifes pre-empt the heyday of staged Instagrammable moments, imbued too with the disillusionment that comes with such carefully constructed perfection. Todd plays on the unsolicited over-abundance of imagery in our lives. She uses the visual language of advertising and portraiture to tempt our judgement of this unknown protagonist and her performance of status. With deliberately cloying imagery, Todd fixates on the familiar, but indulges the culture of surveillance hiding behind the white picket fence.

— Maya Love, 2023