Cassandra Tytler is an artist working within single-channel video and installation. Her work explores contemporary cultural iconography and the idealised realities that exist within it. She is particularly fascinated by the symbolism of popular clichés, and within her work pastiches isolated and fragmented cultural conventions, and shapes them into revealing stories or situations.

Tytler is interested in the mechanics of performance and representation. She performs the roles in her videos as herself and herself-as-cultural-stereotype highlighting the artificial and burlesque nature of the characters she represents. She pushes her performances so that they become a “theatre of performance” – an allusion to the absurdity of the cultural roles we “play” and are played for us in the theatre of life.

Tytler’s work is playful and humorous, and at times absurd, but it is also an ongoing examination of masquerade and mimicry, and seeks to play with her audience’s multiple positions from awareness to forced amnesia, that facilitate their interaction with familiar cultural figures and stereotypes. She is particularly interested in gender representation (both male and female) in popular culture and represents gender as elastic and unrealistic.

Her films have screened in numerous festivals in Australia, the U.S.A., Korea, and Europe, and she has exhibited work in a number of galleries such as A.R.A.C., Paris, Harold Golen Gallery, Miami, Metro Arts, Brisbane, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Plimsol Gallery, Tasmania, Kings Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne, and Westspace Gallery, Melbourne. Tytler completed her Masters degree in Media Arts at R.M.I.T., Melbourne, in 2006. She is currently based in Paris.