Thank You, Ladies.

“Most of the interesting American artists of the last 30 years are as interesting as they are in part because of the feminist art movement of the early 1970’s. It changed everything . . . . What art in the next 30 years will look like I don’t know, but feminist influences will be at its source.”

-Holland Cotter, art critic for The New York Times (http://www.airgallery.org/)

Who/What Are My Influences?

So, I'm working on my 3rd and 4th "4 Artists" classes at the SMFA, and in reading all the visiting artists' influences, I can't help but start considering my own. So, here is my list, as of now, which I am sure will grow as quickly as my internal databank of artists and influences has (when you are older and wiser, it's a bit shocking to to realize how quickly how much more you do know). So here we go: 

Eleanor Antin
Yvonne Rainer
Yoko Ono
Andy Warhol
Janine Antoni
Jenny Saville
Sadie Benning
Abby Child
Victor Kossakovsky
Pipilotti Rist
Bob Ross
Louise Bourgeois
Diane Arbus
Sally Mann
Tracy Emin
Barbara Kruger
Margaret Atwood (particularly Edible Woman)
The Bell Jar
"Mad Girl's Love Song"
Anne Sexton's "Sleeping Beauty"
Cinderlla Ate My Daughter 
Hole
The Velvet Underground
Karen O
Debbie Harry
Bjork
Janis Joplin
Richard Simmons
Hillary Clinton

 I realize this is considerably chick-heavy... what can I say???

"The paradox of consumer culture is that we should and must consume -- our economy depends on it -- but we should at the same time do so discreetly and expensively. Fat challenges this idea. Fat dares to show. Fat is disdained because it is read as greed and an inability to choose or say no..." -Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue

Lucy R. Lippard

"A uniform density, an overall texture, often sensuously tactile and often repetitive to the point of obsession; the preponderance of circular forms and central focus... layers or strata; an indefinable looseness or flexibility of handling; a new fondness for the pinks and pastels and the ephemeral cloud-colors that used to be taboo."

SMFA Annual Student Photo Exhibition

My photograph, Stomach Skin 1 (I can't really keep track of all these numbers though), has been excepted into the SMFA Annual Student Photo Exhibition along with two other photographs I have taken. The opening reception for the show will be Wednesday, March 14, at 5:30, and the work will be up until Friday, April 6.

The Joy of Representational Painting - Draft 2

Mona Hatoum - Corps Étranger

"It is a complex work. It is both fascinating to follow the journey of the camera and quite disturbing. On one hand you have the body of a woman projected onto the floor. You can walk all over it. It’s debased, deconstructed, objectified. On the other hand it’s the fearsome body of the woman as constructed by society.

You enter a cylinder and you stand on the perimeter of the circular video image projected onto the floor. You feel like you are at the edge of an abyss that threatens to engulf you. It activates all sorts of fears and insecurities about the devouring womb, the vagina dentata, the castration complex."

More Jenny Saville

"It's because the nervousness of revealing is inherent that I'm interested in it - not in showing the world my genitalia. It is about being brave enough with myself to offer up that anxiety. I like my neuroses - they are my living sketchbook. I don't want to work them out."

The Joy of Representational Painting

Draft 1

Jenny Saville

"(Flesh) is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive."

Wikipedia - Oil Paint

"Oil paints have a surface translucency similar to human skin, making it an ideal medium for portraits."

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar

"There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice--patched, retreaded and approved for the road."

Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self

"The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words. Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps that outside out; it is the barrier which protects against penetration by the aggression and greed emanating from others….Finally, the third function – which the skin shares with the mouth and which it performs at least as often – is as a site and a primary means of communicating with others, of establishing signifying relations…"

Hannah Wilke

"My mother understands why I’ve used myself nude in some of my artworks, possibly because she lived, when she was young, in an age where women were conditioned to be ashamed of themselves. As an adult, her introversion kept her safe. But I think she recognizes that the safety might have hurt her emotionally, even giving her illness and disease. And having been subjugated by that kind of pressure from society, I think she’s very proud of my thwarting that which has been taught by culture but which I think is inhumane."

Reborn in Blue