Preview
Creation Date
2021
Description
Materials: Watercolor and colored pencil
Dimensions: 18 x 24 inches
Project Advisors: Rob Neilson, Tony Conrad
Year of Graduation: 2021
Medium
Drawing
Medium
Painting
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
COinS
Artist Statement
My current body of work aims to highlight my dysphoria with the expectations placed on women in American society. As a queer woman, I have no desire to conform to the nuclear family model idealized by the so-called “American dream”, and I hope to embody my dissatisfaction- and anger- with gender roles, capitalism, and the current state of American politics in my work.
To accomplish this, I take inspiration from aesthetic and thematic elements of 1940s-1950s post-World War-II advertising and fashion and combine it with a primarily “feminine” pastel color palette. To contrast the historically idealistic American imagery I use, the subjects of my work are usually women or young girls in what I call disturbing situations. Whether it be wrestling a serpent or as a dead bird in a teacup - the aim is to inspire the same out-of-sorts feeling I experience in the viewer. In utilizing vernacular materials, such as colored pencils and watercolors, my aim is to disassociate my work from capitalist high-art. The goal is to ultimately create an obtainable and understandable image of the queer experience unfettered by the viewer’s personal identity or class.
To put it simply; the young girls in my work embody the sheltered and idyllic image of girlhood, and the women represent the societally outlined future that awaits them. They embody my emotions, and their strange situations stand to amplify the disconnect I feel occurs in queer women between childhood and adulthood. On other occasions, the subjects even become animalistic in form to express that inherent “otherness”. I hope that in creating my art I can highlight the undiscussed stress young queer women feel in the face of societal norms.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support I received from the Lawrence University Department of Art and the Chandler Senior Experience Fund. Without their funding this body of work would not be possible.