Manu Duf

The work of Manu Duf  is the construction and destruction of layered images of women

Alex Garant

Alex Garant is a female artist depicting surreal images of other women in oil portraits where facial features are multiplied and offset from one another. This distortion of eyes, noses, and mouths makes her realistic-looking subjects appear unfocused as their bodies are combined with geometric patterns and Art Nouveau-esque flourishes.

Besides the blurred-vision portraits, Garant has less dizzying works where women simply have an extra set of eyes. Noses, mouths, and other attributes remain the same. In some of these images, she’s fused graphic, decorative designs with their skin that are reminiscent of tattoos.

Garant finds inspiration in early ink printing, vintage pop surrealism, baroque tapestries, and retro kitsch. And although the portraits use traditional oil painting techniques, they feel contemporary and fresh.

I love how unsettling these are to look at! Aesthetic goals: make the audience uncomfortable

Ozge Cone

Untitled ( The people who are lost in time or lose memories )

surreal glitch contours of women’s faces/identities

Real Women

From Hanne Blank:

Real women do not have curves.   Real women do not look like just one thing.

Real women have curves, and not.   They are tall, and not.  They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not.  They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

Real women start their lives as baby girls.  And as baby boys.  And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.

Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.

Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards.  Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change.  Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo.  Real women have hair so long they can sit on it.  Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.

Real women wear high heels and skirts.  Or not.

Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.

Real women have ovaries.  Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed.  Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above.  Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.

Real women are fat.  And thin.  And both, and neither, and otherwise.  Doesn’t make them any less real.

There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla:

There is no wrong way to have a body.

I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.

And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.

You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis.  All human beings are real.

Redefining Realness

From Janet Mock:

People assume that I was in the closet because I didn’t disclose that I was assigned male at birth. What people are really asking is ‘Why didn’t you correct people when they perceived you as a real woman?’ Frankly, I’m not responsible for other people’s perceptions and what they consider real or fake. We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us into believing we have the right to make assumptions about people’s identities and project those assumptions onto their gender and bodies.

You Don’t Have To Be Pretty

From The Belle Jar:

We never say that all men deserve to feel beautiful. We never say that each man is beautiful in his own way. We don’t have huge campaigns aimed at young boys trying to convince them that they’re attractive, probably because we very rarely correlate a man’s worth with his appearance. The problem is that a woman’s value in this world is still very much attached to her appearance, and telling her that she should or deserves to feel beautiful does more to promote that than negate it. Telling women that they “deserve” to feel pretty plays right in to the idea that prettiness should be important to them. And having books and movies aimed at young women where every female protagonist turns out to be beautiful (whereas many of the antagonists are described in much less flattering terms) reinforces the message that beauty has some kind of morality attached to it, and that all heroines are somehow pretty.

Feminist Mapping

The Art School at Penn State University has a Feminist Mapping project outline that would be useful to think about how one can use global mapping software to try and understand how women occupy/navigate/mobilise in public spaces.

Chicks on Speed

From Timeout Sydney:

Visitors to the new Chicks on Speed installation environment SCREAM will be able to “control” various elements of the exhibition – a riot of projected images, words, sounds and rhythms – wielding and using the gallery-provided iPads like bizarre musical instruments.

The development of the new art-manipulating app, with the assistance of specialist arty-app-maker extraordinaire Jens Barth, was the next logical step in COS’s multi-disciplinary hyperactivity. The SCREAM exhibition reflects their interest in ideas of connectivity and old and new modes of communication. “I love how technology changes the way we look at the world,” says Logan, “and how we relate to animals and how our gadgets become similar to pets.”

From RMIT DesignHub:

SCREAM introduces a multidisciplinary, practice based approach to performance research, blurring the boundaries between pop-music, fashion, performance and film within an experiential interactive installation or GESAMTKUNSTWERK (a total work of art).

SCREAM will see Design Hub dramatically transformed by Chicks on Speed’s explosive collage of images, sounds and objects. The artists will construct a sonic sculptural installation that also acts as an ‘objektinstrument’ (a self-made musical instrument) – a stage, a canvas and playable installation.  SCREAM questions the role of the audience, by empowering the public with tools to participate in Chicks on Speed’s collective jam session. SCREAM’s interactive nature gives rise to several possible outcomes for the artworks, allowing the audience to be ‘co-authors’ in the mix.

Guerrilla Girls

Interactive street banner at Art Boom Festival, Krakow

WAXCHICK – Vasilia Forbes

Can a woman objectify herself?

WAX starts the discussion of the visual identity of capitalist selling through ‘mystification and production of glamour’, objectification of the body and the impact of historical images of vanity, as we see these images projected in large format across the London cityscape. The ‘photoshop-perfect’ WAX images take cues from historical portraits, (which reference the art-worlds usage of objects as presentations of glamour) and through this the objectification shown in Wax becomes directly sexual and immediately a comment on the ‘woman’s role’ and part she plays in advertising items, including within art works.

Vasilisa’s aim is to create a sensation of ‘power play’ with the historical ideal of how woman should be presented in an image, and the modern aspiration of young women, including the element of aggressive sexuality and male fantasy to fuel the actions behind the poses in the series. The WAX images raise questions in young women of ‘taking back ownership of the body’ and choosing to present it in various ways; against a dominating backdrop of idealised feminine beauty and fantasies. The female appears as the object of various ideals, subjected to impressions from the world of exterior perversions, ideals of feminine appearance, and the aspiration of the so-called ‘female body’. These works create questions through their subversive presence; can I – as a female artist – raise attention to female objectification in advertising and male-directed imagery of women by posing myself through such a light, in the various guises of male fantasy to raise a discussion on how we can alter, remove and bring awareness to this kind of mis-use of the female body.

HER – continues the discussion on female use of the body in a visual, fashion-focused culture; where female sexuality and vulnerability are dictated by the power of marketing. The HER images both question the industry’s suppression of the ‘real woman’ and the generation/usage of perversions or fantasies to dictate the woman’s role, perceived presence or personality. Her passivity vs her human involvement in a photographic image as subject is brought into question and posed to the audience. Many images in this series have received worried reactions – claims of sexism have been scrawled across the images while a feeling of guilt and discomfort has lingered in the voyeur. Do we immediately judge these images to be directed by a male eye?