WORK

This project stems from a body of work presenting academic-style portraiture (in oil on canvas) with a twist of scale. Life-size, forward-facing figures depicted from the chest up are set against immersive exterior backgrounds that swallow the viewer into the moment of encounter. I began with an exploration of nuanced emotion and character study which has now developed to include the more pressing, controversial topic of toxic masculinity from a feminine perspective. Sources of inspiration include Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the 2020 Focus Feature film Promising Young Woman, and even Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. With such references as a thematic guide, I hope to use the intrigue of confrontational portraiture as a means of approaching viewers with heavy topics on feminine psychology and the ‘poisonously psychedelic’ distortions of living in a ‘man’s world.’ This project combines the art historical and literary touches of the feminist perspective (ex: Plath, Louise Bourgeois) with the pop-culture aesthetics of contemporary feminists Lady Gaga (ex: "911" music video) and Beyoncé (ex: Black is King or "Hold Up" music video). The product is a form of feminist image that plays with tensions of nuance/subtlety vs. the jarring; beauty vs. the realistically grotesque; external poise vs. internal mania. Heavily inspired by '80s and '90s era photographer Cindy Sherman and second-wave feminist artist Judy Chicago, this project serves as a form of self-portraiture expressing the psychological effects even a privileged, white woman like myself encounters as engrained within everyday social experience.

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This triptych series is comprised of a central 4’ x 6’ oil painting flanked by two 4’ x 2’ canvases. In a composition abstractly reminiscent of Manet’s bar scene, the central figure is situated at the viewer’s eye level and is fictively seated across a restaurant table complete with place settings and beverages for two. This middle figure emulates the maniacal expression of a woman in distress or at her wit’s end (pulling on stills from Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s music videos); a statement on being pushed to the breaking point by frustration with even the subtle forms of misogyny that take place in, for example, casual restaurant conversation and which often slide by without consequence. There is a climactic visual tension between feminine elegance (the composed, bourgeoisie setting/attire) and the abrupt realism of the ‘graphic shriek.’ This jarring contrast resonates with the thematic tensions of the expected feminine social presence itself.

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The left canvas features a detail of the screaming face ‘un-distorted’ (faintly or sarcastically smiling) behind the patina of the man’s raised whiskey glass (which in the order of narrative sequence has been set down in the central canvas). From the woman’s perspective, the un-distorted or ‘restored normative’ facial expression suggests psychedelic absenteeism, a coping mechanism, or even a form of temporary liberation from the masculine toxin. The man’s perspective uses the traditionally masculine beverage as a lens of ignorance rendering her the happy housewife painted in ‘50s makeup (an imagery which is in turn laden with the implications of shiny spectacle and commodification of the body). The obfuscation speaks to an inability to accept the problem of the woman’s distress as a problem worth addressing. The style calls on and contextualizes the seductive women of Marilyn Minter’s paintings (with her foggy glass close-ups) within a moment of distress in the masculine presence. The perspective also speaks to the harm or debilitation that substance abuse can add to problematic social settings. Stylistically, the juxtaposition of comically distorted facial features in the left iteration with the crisp academic style of the central figure gives a sense of swirling emotion, conflict, tension, and panic. The contrast also heightens the effect of ‘sucking the viewer in’ to personally encounter the subject matter.

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The right canvas contrastingly privileges the woman’s drink as focal point, reclaiming feminine subjecthood while at the same time refusing the explicit presence of the female body. The abstract feminine presence is granted agency in that the rosemary sprig garnishing the wine from the central canvas is now accompanied by skewers of raw meat, a metaphorical drowning of the politically charged and abject masculine material. The intimate perspective calls on Lisa Yuskavage or Jenny Saville’s oil paintings of accentuated female figures and forms, emphasizing the realism of the grotesque or ‘wounded’ aesthetic as a form of feminine perspectival reclamation. Harkening back to Lady Gaga’s imagery, the beautiful aesthetics of crisp wine glass against dark background are preserved but juxtaposed against the “feminine sublime” and her interiority—the abject, bleeding substance inside the glass as well as the woman’s corresponding interior/psychological landscape (Krauss 92). This relies on abject theory by Julia Kristeva or l’informe by Rosalind Krauss involving the reactivation/reclamation of agency by the horizontal, Cartesian woman. Accordingly, the third canvas presents the power of the female’s impending rise; the potential for the agitation, as presented in the central canvas, to be addressed and used for change as a result of shifted social perspective.