MESSAGE FROM THE CURATORS CTD.
It’s official: losingyoursef.com now has a life of its own. And your curators have just begun to turn over in our minds the conceptual connectivity emerging on the site.
Susan has compared the work of artists who center on their rapport with the natural world. Jillian discovered patterns in how some artists examine facets of selfhood and how others critique the traditionally feminine. And I’ve been thinking about projects in which the artists purposefully mediate a range of psychological, emotional and sexual experiences.
In her video document of the performance Devour, for example, Cindy Rehm captures an oddly erotic moment shared by three women passing an orange back and forth without using their hands. The ambiguous characters enact their ritual privately, inside a domestic space. In contrast, Estherka Projekt’s Noh-Chim (Missing) represents a social intervention. Her video documents a young Korean woman’s search for her identity. The quest takes place in different public settings that expose the woman’s acute sense of alienation and loss.
Amber Hawk Swanson grounds her performance installations and videos in the sexual, using her surrogate self—a life-sized doll in her likeness—as a public victim. Amber says her Amber Doll Project examines issues of power and permission in the objectification of women. With the allure of a sex toy, the doll has appeared on “Sex TV,” at tailgate parties and in other situations where she submits to physical abuse.
Both Amber Swanson and Lily McElroy describe their work as feminist. However, Lily takes on the role of aggressor in her public acts. Documented in photographs, her performance is decidedly friendlier, albeit still confrontational. She first asks permission, then literally throws herself at men in bars, subverting typical predator/prey relationships.
Khadijah Queen, likewise the subject of her own work, uses both photography and video to record her performance of raw emotions in intimate settings. In a recent interactive narrative, she embodied rage, sorrow and suspicion. Ali Prosch deliberately channels anguish in an abandoned theatrical space. The performer on stage in Polyphony endlessly emits a high-pitched scream. Though the venue appears empty, she is rewarded for her honest expression with a continuous volley of roses.
Less visceral perhaps, but equally intriguing are two projects that evoke or draw directly from television. Shana Moulton presents her whimsical drama Whispering Pines in a series of episodes. As she plays with the insecurities of her comical character, she exposes a range of emotions typically tied to adolescence and shares her delight in the absurdity of low-brow handicrafts. Stacia Yeapanis produces video collages with select excerpts from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and Charmed that transform their central characters into feminist icons. Her cross-stitched close-ups drawn from those same pop shows transpose digital images by way of traditional needlework into contemporary emotional signifiers.
Amber Boardman’s work is both contemplative and personal. She mediates relationships between women through video narratives spun from text messages, voice mail and her own musical compositions. Textual Healing and I Wish I Could See You reveal how digital communications can carry considerable emotion. The slight disconnect that follows the trail of messages provokes a psychological dis-ease that is no easier to shake than that elicited by more dramatic concepts.
- Cathy
It’s interesting to consider the connections between the artists you site as dealing in psychological, emotional, and sexual experiences. In my own work, I would add the term erotic, to reference a more languid and tactile manifestation of the sexual. For me, there is a significant link between engaging erotic experience and the advancement of feminism. In many of the works here, the artists evoke the sexual as complex subject to develop a narrative of female experience.
In many of the works, internal experience is manifested through exterior actions or gestures. Lily McElroy’s work is a prime example, as she enacts notions of female fantasy and desire through aggressive actions. While the idea of being held or carried by a man is related to nostalgic images of childhood (being held by Daddy), it is also reflects the romantic realm where adult women may be picked up and carried by their enraptured lovers, or lifted over the threshold by their adoring husbands. McElroy forces the affection, as she leaps at the men. She is not passive, yet she begs the man’s safe arms. McElroy evokes the precarious situation of contemporary women who are motivated by mixed messages on love, power, sex, and the body.
Amber Hawk Swanson’s work engages the emotional and the sexual through dark and distressing aspects of misogyny. By using a “real doll” to reenact various scenarios, Swanson illuminates the objectification of women as sexual objects. There is also a relationship to female desire for perfection, as the dolls reflect an idealized version of the female form. Women do alter their bodies to achieve the proportions found in sex-toy dolls; sometimes women make themselves into objects for male pleasure. It’s interesting that Swanson plans to use the doll as a puppet. That action intensifies the powerlessness of the doll, she is not merely a “play thing” but rather will be come an object to be controlled. Swanson’s work is revealing, because the is doll a vehicle to expose the perversions and compulsions of those who interact with her.
I find it curious that there are so few other painters on this site. I guess in this busy world it’s like snail mail – so time consuming. I also find it very interesting that so many women artists now find video, film and virutal so communicative as a medium.
Cindy, thanks for your wonderful insights into your work and that of Lily and Amber.
s.