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 white patriarchal ideals results in shame that many have for their own sexuality, particularly when it fails to measure up to its alleged reflection in pop culture. Consequently, there is a fashioning and refashioning ourselves through these encounters, which only provides fragmentary mis-recognitions that we are conditioned to accept and emulate. As a result, people’s experience with their own image is more like a distorted carnival mirror, in that one can recognize what is depicted but it does not necessarily correspond to how they see themselves, leaving the body in a state of division and incompletion. 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 emotional experiences; thus, articulating the difference between inhabiting a female body and looking at it.
Intersectional 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 interested the radical place of in-betweens and its relation to queer identity. The morphing/merging bodies, their hybridization, their unfixed nature, is a figure that is in open relation to the future. This act of becoming, is in opposition to normatively and is essential to questioning standardize notions of race, gender and sexuality. The emphasis on fragmentation and fracture, as well as on emphasis on re-assemblage transgress boundaries of the body alluding to potential transformation of the white patriarchal norm. This is a political and aesthetic act in which each figure 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.
These figures are in a state of flux, process and change, they are both vulnerable and powerful, beautiful and grotesque; Inverting social bodily hierarchies. By exploring the notion of the uncanny, it exposes the symbiosis of the 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.
The grotesque body is not an ugly body but rather, nonconformist which opposed to the finished and polished. Conceptually it 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/queer body and its 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. By using the strategy of mimesis, in an effort to unravel truths through mimicry of the “ideal” to make the unseen visible, and ultimately disrupting the illusion of singularity, which is contradictory to the multidimensional experience of reality. The grotesque body has both the potential for creativity and destruction. This deconstruction 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.