Women in the Art World

A collection of inspiring art made by female artists.

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Jackie Nickerson, Terrain. A series that explores the relationship between people and earth.  Making photographs in southern Africa, she photographs people working and living off the land, inserting herself in conversations about the food industry and the labor behind it.  

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Lorna Simpson. A contemporary multimedia artist, she uses the combination of imagery and text to comment on current issues of race and gender.

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Izima Karou

Karou takes images of corpses in elaborate, romantic settings for her series, Landscape with a Corpse.  The deadpan title with the fashion rhetoric gives this ironic look at fashion photography.  Taking these models in designer outfits and putting them into intricate landscapes with erotic undertones makes for an subtle commentary on the way the fashion industry sees models. She titles each image after the model and the designer to play on the fashion format of photography.  She has impeccable lighting and narrative elements to add to the drama of the series.  

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Emily Portmann, Somewhere Within Sometimes

Portmann is a young artist using her own body as a means of expression.  These self portraits are taken in this cross between institutional and private setting. All the images confine her body within a space giving the sense of mental confines and self doubt.  The images are haunting with an uncanny element of longing and self-conscious desire.  

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Carrie Mae Weems. 

Although I am obsessed with all of Weems' work, there is a special place in my heart for her The Kitchen Table Series.  I think what gets me about this series is the simplicity; The ability to convey so much from one scene, one location, one family is amazing.     

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Lisa Kereszi. Kereszi's photographs depict a juxtaposition of burlesque dancers and empty interiors of strip clubs.  She entitled the series, Fantasies, because she wants to convey the creation and action of fantasy.   I was interested in how Kereszi talked about her work, specifically the reaction of the mass audience.  I must say, I was surprised by what I read.  She stated in an interview: "I heard a couple of comments that I wasn't supposed to hear about the women in this book being ugly. Someone said something like "Oh, they're naked ladies, but they're ugly." And I was shocked when that was relayed to me. I don't think that at all, but I could see why a regular guy who is used to this air-brushed, silicone implant thing - that's what they want to see naked today. That wasn't the case when burlesque was queen in the fifties. So it's a different kind of guy, I think, that likes this world, and a different kind of person in general. Living in New York and being an artist, you are not really aware of the real world. And this seems much bigger to me than I think it really might be; it is a subculture, it is still an underground thing even if it is popular. The people that are making it popular on TV are Carmen Electra, who looks really skinny and beautiful and perfect. She doesn't seem to have the same charge that these women have." Awesome.

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Mary Ellen Mark. All of Mark's work is sensational, but as of right now Ward 81 is my favorite.  The series features a women's ward in the Oregon State Mental Hospital.  One line in the prologue really struck me:  "The women on this ward are considered dangerous to themselves or to others." Mark has this ability to show humanity in the strangest of places, forcing the viewer to invest and connect with her odd characters. 

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Ashley Kauschinger. Kaushinger's series focuses on the childhood notion to create a mythical place in one's mind. In the series, Avondale, she weaves a place of fantasy and memory in an ethereal manner for the viewer to enjoy and indulge in the childish pleasure of myth.

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Lise Sarfati Her work focuses on the the relationship of photographer and subject, and as her bio states, she creates "A vision in which the individual is environment, a map outlining a perilous cultural geography."   The images are vaguely reminiscent of Cindy Sherman's untitled film stills in the way she gives the viewer a female character to connect to and draw a narrative from.  She names all of her photographs after the woman pictured, and separates them into series by location, allowing the audience to focus on the connection between woman and place.  

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Pictures of My Mother

http://picturesofmymother.com/ There is this amazing tumblr that blogs pictures of submitters' mothers.  It seems as if they have stopped updating, but it is still a cool collection to run through.  The photographs range from family portraits, to prom photographs, to quick snapshots.  Some of them (actually, most of them) are really beautiful portraits, alongside some nice stories.   I like that there is a digital collection of mothers.  There's something really touching about that.  

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Uta Barth.  I can't believe I have not posted about Uta before!  Her photographs are absolutely stunning.  She uses light, and color (or lack thereof) to give a minimalist approach to photography.  The way she catches light through a window and into an open room is impeccable.  Also, I love the way she has small details be the focused thing in the frame.  Often she will have the corner of the wall, or ledge of the window be the focus of the shot, while everything else is blurred.  It creates this intese abstraction, while simultaneously keeping a composition.  It's absolutely amazing.  

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Everybody is setting out to write a full character. It’s just that some people are limited in their imagination of a girl. [A character in "Ruby Sparks" named] Cal’s brother says that in the film: “You’ve written a girl, not a person.” I think defining a girl and making her lovable because of her music taste or because she wears cute clothes is a really superficial way of looking at women. I did want to address that. … I am definitely not interested in adding to the genre of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I’m very happy to have this movie read as a critique of that, if that’s how you want to read it. It’s not how I wrote it — that was not my primary goal. But I really, really think it’s dangerous to reduce a person to an idea

Zoe Kazan on critiquing the manic pixie dream girl trope in Ruby Sparks.  Films are art, therefore I am going to discuss this because I think tropes are fundamentally important to the art of filmmaking.  Ruby Sparks is an upcoming film about a male writer whose main character comes to life. Essentially, Cal, has willed the written girl of his dreams, Ruby, to come to life.

Now, Ruby is the ultimate manic pixie dream girl... fictitious, indie, beautiful, stylish, and whose primary role is helping the tragic, sensitive hero realize his true potential.  The manic pixie dream girl is not a person, she is an idea.  An idea created in order to narrow the female human experience and reduce women to a figment of desire.   I think it rocks that a movie is addressing the problems of this trope, and the problematic approach to writing women as the manic pixie dream girl. Thank you, Zoe Kazan. 

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Claudine Doury.  From the series, Sasha, Doury depicts the experience of growing up and into female adolescence.  Her work gives me the same feeling I had when I read Plath's The Bell Jar-  "Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air".  Especially with the top left image, it goes so well.  

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Debora Mittelstaedt. Mittelstaedt is a German photographer who works primarily in fashion photography, but has these amazing series' that she separates geographically.  The above images come from the series', New York and Iceland. I like that her photography has a very fashion feel... they're carefully placed, and color-minded... but they have substance to them.  They're not simply about the aesthetic, they give a greater sense of purpose and depth to the people in the image. 

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Jenny Holzer.   Holzer started her work with her most renowned project called Truisms.  Her work consists of simple statements that are stylistically reminiscent of mass culture, or widely accepted truths.   She began by posting these "truths" by herself around Manhattan, but now the displays of the messages are on Billboards, LED signs, projections, and in curated shows.   She has also expanded to longer forms of text, such as poetry, which is featured above. The wooden panels were also created and passed out during a show and each held a truism that she had written.   

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Laurie Anderson.   Anderson photographed men who called to her or whistled her on the street.  In her artist statement she writes about one experience,

"As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon.  I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered 'Wanna fuck?'  This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object.  I wheeled around, furious. 'Did you say that?' He looked around surprised, then defiant 'Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?' I raised my Nikon, took aim began to focus.  His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK."

Anderson takes the power from her male pursuers, allowing them nothing more than the momentary fear that their depravity has just been captured in a picture.  

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There is a popular notion that the photographer by nature is a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979)