Pertinent Quotes

In various ways, I feel like these quotes relate or inform my process of thinking, making and acting out.

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object –– and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1972), 47.

“A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude towards herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste ––indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence.”

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 46.

“…Broadly speaking there is a general tendency to endorse the idea that the individual subject as such is inseparable from the condition of being the subject to; for example, subject to ideology (of which gender ideologies are a significant instance), the state, commodity culture, and so forth.

Lisa Gabriella Mark, ed., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 337.

Nochlin writes, “Women must conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity, or cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.”

Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays.

“Giving our bodies over to others to do as they want with them is a form of collusion in our own continuing infantilization.”

Dawn Ades and others, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self Representation, 13.

Small thought.

I feel like, at this point in time, I am interested in exploring the small, obsessive parts of identity that accumulate into a larger idea, that then snowball with other bits of identity, that then complete a whole person. But what is a whole person made of? What are the categories of identity? How far can I break them down before they desolve into unsubstantiated nothingingness? But if I can break any bit of identity down to it's most banal parts and then make it trivial, then what does that say? That we need the whole in order to validate all the little pieces that garner our attention along the way?

I weighed myself three times today. This is not abnormal.

3/9/10: 10:54am-176.4 lbs, 10:15pm-174.4 lbs, 12:17am-176 lbs.

This is obsessive. This is unnecessary. These measurements tell me nothing about the whole. But still, I want to know. I need to know to keep myself on track, to stay motivated, to be aware of who am at this moment. But the goal is larger and further away. The the issue of health is more complex then how much I weigh, but still I measure, in the most simple way I can, my "progress" and "myself."

A Statement

My work examines the conflicting and often tangential desires of the modern female psyche. In a world filled with options and promise, I attempt to look simultaneously backwards and forwards. By contemplating historic female roles and modern day revolutions I hope to show how both worlds intersect for a confusing and schizophrenic lifestyle of over-inflated expectations, wants and needs. Through clothing choice and performance, I let my body and its interpretive visual language speak to the complexities of the current female’s social experience.

Selecting clothes from my own wardrobe, comprised of goodwill finds and modern day renditions on vintage items, I hope to personify the previous owner’s experience through my own lens. By contemplating her mindset, time period, social restrictions and domestic roles in relation to their modern day mutations and inflations, I hope to show the large rifts occurring in identity and sense of self. Using my body as a filter to embrace and questioning the rules and expectations of 2nd Wave Feminism, I show both what I’ve absorbed and rejected. By collapsing the generations into one body, I call into question ideas of progress, restriction, power, play and sexuality.

Nail on the head.

Taken from a catolgue of Cindy Sherman's work, the following quote is from an article titled The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical Performance by Elisabeth Brofen

"By presenting herself other then what she is, by refashioning the media images and narratives that influenced her self-image, she insists that the act of self-representation, as a means of expression, simultaneously always also performs the act it designates…..The subject of the portrait has been created performatively, in fact it can only be articulated as a performance. The represented subject can, therefore, be understood as a knot, binding together various languages that have shaped it and through which it is able to express, in a displaced and dislocated manner, its traumas, its memories, its desires and its fantasies. In addition, this represented subject performatively embodies the laws and dictates imposed upon it by the family and by society, as well as culturally acquired repertoire."

Elisabeth Bronfen, Cindy Sherman: Photographic Work 1975-1995, ed. by Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander. (Germany: Schirmer Art Books ,1995), 14.

Although in my work, I attempt to suggest a stronger link between family and society then with my pop cultural surroundings, I think the sentiments, both general and specific, apply accurately to my work.

Photographing the photographs

These photographs are documentation of what I've been working on this quarter. The photographs are 4x6, made to handle. I Like what they do in relationship to one another, both physically and conceptually. More installation shots to come after walk through.

Working Artist Statement

My work hinges on the implications and expectations that the modern woman can “have it all”. I use the body and it’s adornments to express both the multitude of capabilities inherent in being a modern female, and the tiring restraints that are self inflicted and culturally imposed. Using my body, it’s gesture and inherent expressive qualities, I aim to both question and convey modern expectations of dress and behavior by showing strain, self-confidence, traditional values and modern drive and success.

An explanatory article on "Having it All"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/nov/27/gender.observerpolitics