RE: series - Self-reflection/refraction/reflexion

RE: Fire?, 2010



The Obsure(d) Object of Desire, 2010



Narcissister, 2010



Self-Rejection, 2011




RE: Odalisque, 2010

Diving out: Paul Thek

Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, 2010

Images of Thek’s work, and his name kept popping up, so intuitively I visited the exhibition at Whitney, knowing nothing about him beforehand. I actually assumed he was contemporary because his work looked so fresh in the images I had seen. Speaking of fresh…let’s start with the meat.

The exhibition begins with meat. A room of sculptures are rendered in highly skilled replication of juicy pieces of flesh, mostly encased in glass. Immediately David Cronenberg’s, Videodrome, screamed reference in my head. They are same in plastic, B-movie, sci-fi aesthetic with the outcome of gross, funny, cheesy and ridiculous. A great way to start off an exhibition, with a B-movie banger! So, let’s bang on.

The exhibition continued with a couple rooms of installation pieces. The gory, horror, flesh theme was surviving in various ad-hoc forms. The work was hokey, but unsettling. The arrangement of fake visceral compositions, piled in the exhibition setting was irreverent, either to the artwork or to the museum space I am not sure. Perhaps because the blood and gore was so obviously fake, it brought to mind mortality and the futility of perfection. The contrast of flesh and blood and decay in the pristine white wall space exposed this even more. Just as the installations dealt with the concept of decay, so they were decaying themselves, not meant to stand the test of time.

Following room after room of this maze presentation of a life felt uncomfortably intimate. The rooms of Thek’s paintings on newspaper and wood sculptures, where baby blue and pink reigned, were my favorites. They were smooth, graceful and genuine. These rooms made the work at the beginning look like it was trying too hard, the technical time and skill put into the work clunked like an old car. The blue and pink room purred. Simplicity in material and technique and color proved to elevate the same themes in his earlier work, except here he added a new element: beauty.

The exhibition carried on from here with ever more intimacy, with journals and pieces revealing doubts and questions of a spiritual and personal nature. The final room with paintings hung low to the ground made me cry, it makes me cry to think of it now, but in a fresh way, not a sad way. The way you cry when you say something true, something you didn’t know you knew. It sneaks up on you. (Of course, reliably, the wall text over-explained and over-sentimentalized the work.) An exhibition hung low is humbling to view. Meant for children, adults must bow or crouch down to look. This is modesty in visual eloquence. This humble, child-like work as Thek’s finale numbed the bravado of the exhibition’s beginning. The meat works are hearty showstoppers, but the true meat is found in the most simple, most humble, most honest heart openers.

Check My Swagga Out

Les Demoiselles du Miroir, 2011

feminineSWAG

The Pin-up Grrl paintings arose from my usual interest in the collaboration of a woman’s interior world and her exterior presentation, or simply: feminine identity. Usually fashion as costume is my focus, but in this series I used a woman’s unclothed body to display sexuality, a mix of power and vulnerability.

Women’s nude bodies are attributed with a powerful ability to visually express sexuality, but to be naked is also a physical form of vulnerability. It is exciting to see a woman combine a sensual, wild, untrained freedom with a confident self-mastery: or feminineSWAG. The struggle for balance in a push/pull of power and vulnerability creates an interesting tension.

Burlesque is performance which reconciles the exterior and the interior. No one can see the inner you because the inner you does not have a tangible form. This leaves one free to fantasize and create a physical form of “inner innerliness”. Not only do you not know who you are, but you don’t know how others view you, so this leaves complete freedom to find a form of self-expression that truly amuzes (amuses/amazes) you.

To master ones’ presentation takes confidence in wielding the tool of one’s own body. But feminineSWAG can’t just look authentic, it has to come from an inner authenticity. For success to be achieved for both viewed and viewer there needs to be a collaboration of interest between the internal and external. Between a woman’s invisible spirit and her visible form. Just as glamour and fashion provide power to its’ wearer so does a woman’s naked body. Without clothes a woman still performs, but she must always perform for herself.

The key to good Burlesque as well as good fashion sense is to be skilled in self-objectification. The trick is to be able to view oneself without subjective bias from the outside. But does this concept hinder natural free expression? Don’t people want to be loved for who they really are, not just how they appear to be? But as I stated before, who are we really? Does anyone truly know? What “inner innerliness” are we afraid to express or not express clearly enough? Learning to objectify oneself, to see oneself as a container, knowing that it is only the exterior and doesn’t automatically reflect what is on the inside is an important lesson. This lesson is critical as a woman ages. My mother recounted that she is shocked when she looks in the mirror because it does not reflect accurately what she feels herself to be on the inside, a fresh 24 year old.

Stepping away from that ideal of young beautiful perfection is a form of self-respect. But as French women know best the exterior needs cultivation. And in a way that is playful and arises from the interior direct, with flaws, fantasies and all. Beauty is found in imperfections, which create distinction and leaves the general for pursuit of the extraordinary. FeminineSWAG combines the inner subjective natural with the objective artifice. The deep with the shallow. The truth with the lie. All for the benefit of a woman who looks and is looked at.

Pin-Up Grrrls

Showgrrl #1, 2009

Pin-up Grrl #1, 2009

Pin-up grrl #2 (interior), 2009

over-exposed (black/white), 2009

double display, 2009

caught, 2009