Current Project

I spent the month of November at the Vermont Studio Center, which is the largest artist residency in the USA. If you are a visual artist or writer you should check them out because they have a lot of work-study and scholarships and you can go for 2-12 weeks, year-round. It is a particularly international and age-diverse residency.

I began to work on a narrative piece at VSC, which I am still working on, so I am posting pictures of the work in my studio. Here is the blurb I posted next to the work I hung  in the VSC gallery:

I am working on a heterosexual erotic story that is an attempt to articulate a female gaze. It is the story of an encounter with the male gaze, in a scenario that has been historically portrayed as a passive and objectifying encounter for women. I think there is something intrinsically objectifying about male desire; (’I see it, I desire it’) but also something very erotic about being an object of desire. I wanted to explore this pervasive male visuality through female eyes (I speak of my own eyes of course, although the subject is a fictionalized version) and rearticulate this encounter so it is not a silencing or disabling one. Instead I want to express it from an active position, as a subject who is authoritative in her position.
This particular story involves a male-artist and a female-model; however the subject in the story is the female model. The story is articulated through this one woman’s eyes; literally; and her body never appears. The story unfolds through her gaze, where her eyes linger. The drawings are created from memory, fantasy and from existing images. The images I collected and incorporated are from magazines, “fine” art, romance novels, facebook, personal photographs, and film stills. In other words, the story is created from a collection of images; the sources were those that I determined had provided me with this categorical narrative in the first place.
I thought carefully about the degree to which the male gaze causes women to see themselves through the eyes of others, and how to challenge that through the story. I hope the explicitly derivative imagery helps the viewer, like me, consider the narratives that we passively absorb, and also suggests that we might exercise power by becoming more proactive subjects who are capable of speaking from precise and distinct perspectives.

I feel compelled to acknowledge that sexual power of women over men is not absolute or unproblematic; and that this type of power is symptomatic of a widerspread phenomenon: women often gain power through men. This position is also tied to a certain youth, which (among myriad other problems) furthers its instability. I understand that men always have the option to take the sexual power of women back from them through sexual violence, and the power of women is always contingent on that trust. The eroticism of the story depends upon two individuals meeting as equals.
The series is meant to examine my mental space, and is not meant to express any monolithic “feminine sexuality.” The topic is fantasy, and explicitly unfolds within the space of one fictionalized woman’s mind. It is about imagination, not concrete interactions. It is erotica.

.