ARTIST STATEMENT

The average age individuals lose their virginities is at 16.9 years of age. However the statistical sexual exploration rate varies between men and women. Men begin exploring their sexualities at 16.9 years of age while women are reported as not beginning to feel comfortable exploring their sexual interest until 17.9 years of age. In western societies, there is a oppressive stigma surrounding sex. When women lose their virginities at a young age, they are labeled as “impure” or a whore, however, when men loose their virginities at a young age it is perceived as the awakening to manhood. This is but only one of the suppressive challenges women face surrounding sex. Beginning with the early stages of my womanhood I have desired to create an artistic practice that highlights the experiences behind women’s lives through the lens of Fourth-Wave Feminism. I choose the experiences behind the lives of women because I aspire to direct attention towards the taboo interest involved in the reality principle of understanding sexuality and “sexual objects”. My works are a manifestation of feminine figures as well as a feminist assessment of conceptions behind women’s sexuality and sexual identity. It is through the bold assertaveness of the nude that I focus on how patriarchal norms of society should not place clouds of shame upon women for enjoying and engaging in sex. In continuing the legacy of this type of work that promotes the male gaze, early modernist depictions of the female nude captured objectified gazes of sexuality and pushed appetites of heterosexuality onto the women they captured. While the objectification and sexual desires expressed through these works are a normal aspect of human sexuality, historically one of the objectives the female nude has continued to serve is feminine inferiority while also keeping the female sexual body monitored and restrained.

A large fraction of my feminist practice revolves around equality in sex. For that purpose pornography and erotica play an integral role in how people begin to learn and identify with their sexualities. In this regard, I create traditional oil paint compositions on panel and canvas that depict erotic images of women in legal pornography. I choose to work with pornography despite its negative connotations because the overt eroticism behind actions of pornography allows me to give the women depicted in my work a means of sexual authority over their bodies. Pornography at its deepest roots was created as a means of entertainment for the male gaze. However, pornography in western societies has transgressed into a form of erotica that equally caterers to the sexual appetites of women as it does men. Legal pornography in this regard has advanced as a bracket of sexual capital for women to explore their sexualities. In my work, I use the sexual capital experienced by the women I depict so I can permit myself to depict women who can explore and empower their sexualities on their terms. Therefore, each painting gives me the means to depict women and the female nude with different reinterpretations of sexuality with an honest sensibility. I desired to use this honest sensibility to depict women and sexuality in its most candid state.

This cause and effect in greater context have me conscious that my work can be interpreted with my contemporaries in the field of figuration, and as a derivative of feminism’s historical significance in painting. However, while figuration, the female nude, and the human body are recurring concepts within painting’s historical significance I need to point out that sexuality and a person’s sexual identity do not exist in a vacuum. With subtle satirical criticism in expression the work I create operates outside the confines of a space devoid of meaning and matter because my work allows me to debunk the gendered stereotype of women’s repressive heterosexuality and to create frank states out of new sensibilities towards women’s sexual authority over their bodies.