I often find myself engaged in sessions of silence, and it’s the silence that has driven me to be more of an active observer than a conversationalist. I love immersing myself in the day and fully absorbing every detail of my surroundings. It was my interest in communication and my attention to detail as an observer that drove me to pursue art.
My artwork began as an exploration in visual communication. My previous works were rooted in semiotics and revolved heavily around color theory and the incorporation of braille, the writing system for the visually impaired. My work was highly therapeutic in nature, and I used my work as kind of a journal for how I experienced the world. As I dove further into my work I saw a strong connection between my ideas and my relationships with others around me. I observed conversations, gestures, and body language as a study into human communications. My work evolved by incorporating drawn images of the people who impacted me regularly. I still incorporated the use of braille as a journaling method, but turned away from color and symbols. During this time of observation I felt like I was making powerful works that released my most private thoughts to the general public. It felt really good to make this work, but not as great to show it. I felt incredibly vulnerable when I had to defend my work. I felt as though it spoke for itself. Still, the tension was there between me as a maker who created the images and me as an individual who sat with the words and blurbs of text from journal entries. It was at this time that my work shifted. I was still deeply interested in the ways in which we as people communicated, but I was no longer in rural Missouri. I was in Chicago at this point and really struggling to find meaning and significance in what I was experiencing every day. The ways in which people were communicating was completely different than what I had experienced before. Actually, from what I could see, people were doing their best not to communicate. Walking down the street, riding the train, or even out with friends people spent less time actually conversing and more time behind a screen. And even though I was in a place with far more people, I felt more alone than ever. I felt like the engagement I received from my peers as well as strangers was always somehow filtered through their device. Everything outing became an event to be captured, every meal became a work of art, and every image captured became an advertisement for societal expectations. This was when I began to mass create the images I was surrounded by on a regular basis. And just as before I found myself drawn to the images of people. Now, I wasn’t interacting with the people that I was painting, although I knew them well. I never asked them to come over and sit in front of me so I could paint their aura. Rather, I found my interactions with their virtual selves far more interesting. I developed a serious interest in portraits people took of themselves. You know, selfies. I looked at friends and acquaintances as virtual beings and tried to experience their images as an outsider looking in. It became fascinating how selfies developed and were loaded with symbolic representations of the self, or how people saw or more so wanted to see themselves. I noticed a strong correlation between the images women, much like myself, were putting out into the world and the images associated with advertisements for the “ideal woman”. The constant immersion in advertisement, pushed a large portion of women to feel like they had to represent themselves in a way other than what they were. I used social media as inspiration and found there were, and still are, TONS of images for me to use as resource. Actually, it felt as though I really couldn’t escape the selfie, in any format. Even if I wasn’t online, I would be out at a cafe or museum and would see people searching for that perfect location or angle to take a selfie. The device always seemed to be doing the same things for the user, specifically women. It created a platform for women to become objects. Now, women have subjectively been seen as over sexualized, beauty objects for quite some time, but devices put the control directly in the hands of each woman. Instead of being objectified by our male counterparts or advertisements we, as women, were objectifying ourselves. We became more than willing participants. This concept is something I, as a woman and young mother, struggled with during this study. My current body of work is a series of watercolor portraits on satin. I took these images and made them into real, tangible objects. I am attentive on color as an over-the-top beautification of each photo much like the filters that are applied on social media platforms. All facial features have been removed and there is a strong focus on gesture as representation. They no longer just existed in the digital format. Each image was a part of a greater whole that became a substantial piece of existence. I spent hours on each square tile, not just painting the image, but carefully stitching and quilting each portrait. This labor was representative of the concept of women’s work and the time and labors spent buying into the beauty industry. Once each tile was stitched it was stretched and mounted fulfilling its duty as a painting. Photographed is a series of nine portraits, displayed in the form of a grid which is a call back to its original format of social media as well as representative of the pieces life as a quilt. This display is just one of many pieces that aims to toy with the tension between the soft beauty of each tile and the overwhelming repetition of images in media. My work is a study of these images. It is a study of beauty, body language, and femininity interested in advertisement, objectification, and the concept of “women’s work”. How have these mass quantities of selfies altered the way in which women view themselves or their societal expectations? Currently, women are still struggling to gain equal rights and “find their place” in society. I have heard countless arguments that a woman must decide her place. She can be an object of desire, a driven and powerful professional, or a dedicated and loving mother. BUT she can’t be all three. Now, I’m not saying that all selfies are anti-feminist or that any woman who takes selfies has any premeditated thoughts about what that photo is saying about them as an individual or a woman. Rather, I am asking again a question of communication. What are these images saying for us as women, and how much thought was given to such images before they were just put out into the world? Who are these images for and why are they being made? I want my viewers to spend time with work and answer these questions for themselves because just as there is no one way of communicating, there is no one thing that is being communicated. Each piece can stand alone or with the masses. Where will you stand? |