FemmeVolition:
Senior Juried Show 2004
April 24-May 23, 2004
Morgen
Larsen
Once I had decided to claim portraiture as a genre in which
to work, I felt a heavy weight and a sense of dangling on a
string above a deep canyon. This is dangerous and compelling
territory. My art-history-trained brain was rattling on:
why do this now? think of all the images of young women already
clogging up the field of painting. this is the domain of the
“masters” you admire so much. they were all pigs!
you want to be like that? go on. just try to reconcile your
attraction to women and your desire to use them as subjects
with your feminism.
These thoughts knocked me over and as I laid flat on my back
for some time. When I woke up, I chose a group of androgynous
friends as my project. Visual manifestation of gender may be
apparent in costume, expression, or posture, and it forces the
viewer to respond according to their ideas about what is “male”
and what is “female”. What is it about our experience
of Western visual culture that determines how we will react
when confronted by these “types”?
I then chose to use myself as the subject of a series. Again,
this work concerns questions of identity and conflicts between
perceptions of self versus what the world sees. Identity is
layered, and often the process of peeling away at it is messy,
unpleasant, surprising. These images perfectly describe how
I feel at this moment, leaning over the protective barrier of
“college student” and finding nothing safe to dive
into, but exhilarated by possibilities at the same time.
I
have skewed the space within these images in order to present
settings that are psychological and theatrical. What I have
chosen to reveal to you is related strongly to problems I’ve
wrestled with as someone whose medium (paint) and subject (women)
have been traditionally dominated by men in the history of artistic
practice. By creating these images I begin to negotiate my place
in a field still replete with passive female figures.
Morgen
received this year’s Abigail Quigley McCarthy Center for
Women’s award, April 2004, for undergraduate research
and creative work with her portraits, “Heather,”
“Meg,” and “Polkey” featured in this
exhibition.
Other
FemmeVolition Artists
|
Self
Portrait After Suzanne Valadon
From
top to bottom: Stage I, Onion Skin, Stage II
Gesture
I, Gesture II, Gesture III, Gesture IV
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