Artist Statement

The analysis of visual culture is a central focus in my work: the issues of gender, sexuality, race and power permeate into all aspects of our society's visual culture. As John Berger observed, “Men act. Women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” His idea is that, the nude in western art reveals a taming of the female body creating  and distorting “ideal beauty” conceptualized by male artists. The devastating implication of this work in general appears to be that women's bodies cannot be portrayed other than through the regimes of representation, which produce woman as passive objects for the male gaze. 

This significance of the identification of women with the body is that women in our culture learn their own particulars for self-surveillance. This internalization of these ideals results in shame that many women have for their own sexuality, particularly when it fails to measure up to its alleged reflection in pop culture, as well as how we both compound and confront that shame by compulsively returning to those images in movies, television and fashion magazines. Consequently, we fashion and refashion ourselves through these encounters, which only provides fragmentary mis-recognitions that we are conditioned to accept and emulate. As a result, woman’s experience with their own image is more like a distorted carnival mirror, in that we recognize what is depicted but it does not necessarily correspond to how we see ourselves, leaving the body in a state of division and incompletion.

Feminist exploration into visual culture aims to unfasten the binaries of gender and sexuality in visual representations. This is why I use the female body, as a site of resistance, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession. I am exploring the notion of the uncanny as it exposes the symbiosis of feminine division of self for survival. This investigation is an intense searching for an identity that will never be defined, its fluidity evokes a maximum number of possible future identities to exist. 

I am interested the radical place of in-betweens and movement. This is where the body seems to morph — when it is motion. I am trying to capture this fleeting moment in time and space that cannot be seen unless through a camera. The morphing body represents the changing of femininity to suit the present “image” of women, it is the moment where a woman becomes another woman through fragments of the female self being passed on through time. This is a political and aesthetic act in which each fragment participates in the pulverization of past traditions that were traditionally upheld and valued. These bodies shed skin, ooze, vertebrae protrude outside the flesh, it is a body that breaks out from its allotted space from which a new life springs. The multiplication of the female form serves as a metaphor for the metamorphosis of femininity, the transformation of women over the centuries, from being whole to incomplete beings. This work re-examines questions between the distinction of biology and culture, by exploring the way in which culture constructs the biological order in its own image.

By turning inside to outside, it exposes the superficiality of the skin and as a changeable mask, revealing that the corporeal is just a changeable surface and does not reflect the eternal. It is what is underneath the mask, this externalization of the interior, that reveals something that is hidden, an invisible dimension of self identity, resulting in an nonconformist figure that is opposed to the finished and the polished and is always in the process of emerging from or on the verge of slipping back into the material. Giving birth to a sort of angst, its rendering reveals a nakedness that is aggressively emphasized by its tactility, is an expression of the feeling of the body’s interior projected in an exterior space. I am emphasizing the concept of the grotesque, which is not an ugly body, rather, nonconformist which is opposed to the finished and polished. The grotesque body is used as a vehicle for exploring the effects of its repression: the uncanniness exposes the presumed familiarity of symbolic violence and its reaction to the female forms link to monstrosity. That is linked to the fear of female power and the anti-female message in greek myth and culture, that still persists to this day.

My work exhibits the cost of inhabiting the female body: it is an existential dilemma that deals in the real, which is not imagined feelings, but it is drawn from the catharsis of dramatic emotional experiences; thus, articulating the difference between inhabiting a female body and looking at it. It speaks of the segmentation of the body and to the female body as the site of division. My work dances between the very same and the very different, it registers both sameness and difference, of being like, and of being. This strategy is an effort to unravel feminine truths through mimicry of the ideal, to make the unseen visible, and ultimately disrupts this singular notion of a “correct femininity” that has both the potential for creativity and destruction. This deconstruction of identity is to reconstruct, it is to dissolve, to oppose traditional binary distinction. It is a critical practice of playing with ideas and thus destroying convention and giving representational form new thoughts.

References

Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Feminist Visual Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. 2001.

Diprose, Rosalyn. The Bodies Of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London & New York: Routledge. 1994

Jones, Amelia. The Feminism And Visual Culture Reader Second Edition. Routledge: London & New York. 2010.

Kokoli M. Alexandra.The Feminist Uncanny:Theory And Practice.New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2016

Lomas, David. Narcissus Reflected.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011

O’Bryan, Jill C. Carnal Art: Orlans’s Refacing. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1999

Pollock, Griselda & Sauron, Victoria Turvey. The Sacred and The Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference. New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. 2007.

Taussig, Micheal. Mimesis & Alterity: A Particular History Of The Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.