Final Product: Posturing Piece

Untitled (January 2011) from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

Kristian Kozul

Thinking about her work in relationship to my dolls. Humor plus heavily used consumer objects already encoded with their specific cultural stigmas. Altering the object to rediscover the object.

Woman-Girl-Doll: The Beginnings

Woman-Girl-Doll from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

Sorry about the quality. It doesn't compress well for Vimeo. I'll figure this out.

Here is the beginnings of an idea. The bare bones of the process and direction. Thoughts I'm ruminating on/around/above and below:

A.) The need to construct and deconstruct ideas of gender/femininity.
B.) Need to MAINTAIN control over performance of gender/femininity.
C.) Traditional vs. Contemporary standards of lady-like behavior.
D.) Standardization of dolls given to little girl. Who plays with dolls and what kind of women do they become. What if the dolls became the women that played with them.
E.) Do you have to rebel to be liberated? Does liberation dictate a change in appearance or only a change in mindset?
F.) The doll moves back and forth between tradition and liberation. Is she struggling? Is this reality? What does she gain through either transformation? What does she loose? Is it important that she is liberated? Is this reality?

Lilli Carre

Beautiful little illustration and moving images. Made me laugh multiple times. I also enjoyed the function and form of her website. Check it out.

Chelsea Knight

Another interesting video artist. Looking into researching her more.

Marianna Ellenburg

Interesting artist I found while browsing possible gallery/exhibitoin spaces. Her work is a combination of video/sound/photographs about the body and phamecutical drugs. Beautifully asthetisized to lure us in and engage in a critic of prescription drugs.

Take a Look.

New Piece

Here's my most recent piece. I need to adjust the audio and work with the levels in Color a bit, but otherwise I love it.

Untitled from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts

I want to do this.

Black Rock Arts Foundations

http://www.blackrockarts.org/grants

This grant organization sounds right up my ally. Interactive Community work.... I have an idea and a road trip evolving around this very subject.

Creative Capitol

http://creative-capital.org/

An excellent grant program. I will dream and drool over this opportunity until I am qualified.

Pinky Bass

I'm interested in Bass's use of embroidery, coupled with the natural photographed body. The results seem simultaneously intimate and objective, weaving the emotive throughout the scientific.

Pinky Bass

Her topic at SPE is "Can I Still Call Myself a Photographer?" And is that really important anyway?

I look forward to hearing her thoughts on this.

Thesis Proposal: First Three Paragraphs

Through this body of work, Perfect Is As Perfect Does (working title), I investigate the relationship of the individual to larger social systems. Using the form and language of well-ingrained manners, media images and expectations, and gender performance, I am interrogating the underlying structures through which we participate in the creation of our own stereotypes. The main subject of my work is the creation, perception and perpetuation of the white, American, middle class “good girl” character. I examine the conflict between the American dream of individual agency and the system of influences aiming to create and recreate stereotypes, social structures, and class expectations.

I plan to explore the character of the middle-class girl using visual themes such costuming, absurdity, formal manners, exhaustion, deterioration, rehearsal, training and futility. By pushing the limits of the “good girl’s” external perfection, I examine individual choice as well as the pressure of choice within the American class system. By placing my character in direct questioning to the system in which she operates, I am acknowledging the conflict between personal agency and systematic dominance.

The “good girl” character is one I understand from my own experience. Through researching my upbringing—what I watched on television, read in books and magazines, and listened to on my personal CD player—I elaborate upon and critique the stereotype I embody. I explore the contemporary definition of the “good girl” through themes such as “Reviving Ophelia” and “Girl Power,” which emphasize both individualization and individual choice in young women while also recognizing the media systems and upbringings that create those same stereotypes. I draw upon public education, religion, media, language, and social structures, as well as the morals and ethics created by those chosen and reproduced environments.

Posture Practice

Posturing Rough Draft from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

This piece is a very rough draft of ideas I'm beginning to work on. I'm interested in ideas of posture and it's relationship to feminine definitions of beauty. In the past, women stood for lengths of time with a book on their head practicing the "art" of standing up straight. Presumable for the lofty goal of getting a husband... and emphasizing boobage. Modern society considers these tactics outdated, perhaps even barbaric. Although the methods may have moved on, the desires and implications have not.

For further exploration of this idea I'll be looking into the trendy practice of yoga. What started out as an underground hippie counter-culture past time (and before that, an ancient asian art practiced by tiny little religious men) has now become a status symbols for fit soccer moms and career women everywhere.

"Where did you get those rockin' biceps? Your ass is so tight, for your age...."
"Well I do yoga 5 times a week. It's better then sleeping, better then eating. I feel whole and centered. I feel like I can conquer the world."

The benefits of yoga are nothing to wiggle your jelly roll at. I've seen the fruitful miracles of many dedicated middle age women and their daughters... but how are those "miracles" the same or different then then patience and tranquility instilled in young girls when they were training to be house wives?

Do a head stand to have excellent posture. Lift your leg over your head for flexibility... and better sex. Hold that strength pose longer, for powerful (slimmer) thighs and weight control. Go out in the world and hold you head high. You do yoga and you'll "turn out well."

Final Four Minute Version of the Jump Rope Video

Untitled from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.