Culture, Identity & the Visual Arts: Who Am I? [ page 3 ]

The working process for most of these drawings is significant, reflecting my efforts to shed light on what is concealed or veiled in the unconscious. These drawings begin with a prepared surface of dissolved graphite over gesso that is nearly black - a dark, rich, silvery gray surface that reveals form only through its own demise. The graphite is eroded away, creating various degrees of illumination and defining form that is reluctant to be defined. The subversion of traditional additive drawing techniques further emphasizes the emotionally dark nature of the subject matter. While the physical form is beautiful and mysterious in its structure and the play of light against shadow, there is the unseen lurking beneath the surface, a suggestion of profound shame or malevolence, of psychic and emotional disease. Tension lies in the conflict between the aesthetic beauty of the drawn form and the implied corruption of the spirit.

It is interesting to note the broad range of responses that this particular body of work arouses. Contingent upon the viewer’s own personal, social and cultural history, these images have at various times been described as erotic, nightmarish, beautiful, scary, provocative, pornographic, terrifying, and even boring. And in fact, they are all of these things to different people. But most significantly for me, they were cathartic, even self-indulgent, and absolutely necessary at the time. I was attempting to purge my personal demons. They represented a barrier through which I must pass if ever I was going to broaden my vision and allow other, less wounded aspects of my identity to emerge and flourish.

The successful confrontation of my own history was in great part due to this particular body of work and the difficult self-examination that fueled it. After years of artistic self-absorption and the completion of this series, I could finally see beyond myself, and the relief was profound. But that is not to say that I especially liked what I saw. While there remained a strong sense of marginalization and fragmentation in my cultural experience, I was now better equipped to speak to it in a more universal voice. I recognized that mine were not solitary experiences, and that my experiences were indicative of a larger cultural phenomenon that continues to privilege the few over the many. My interest in writing and the emergence of language-based critical theory (particularly Deconstruction) led me to examine one of numerous ways in which language creates and supports the pervasive practice of “othering.”

In a series of drawings from the mid 1990’s titled Waging a Word War, my interest in the human form gives way to various representations of animals. These domestic animals function as signifiers for aspects of women’s experience in western culture. They are evidence of a cultural linguistic practice that objectifies and dehumanizes women by selectively positioning them in the animal realm, over which man considers himself to have authority. Women are reduced to isolated fragments of the self and filtered through a misogynistic male gaze. Women are critiqued, labeled and deemed sexually desirable or not based on their body type, their genitalia, their facial proportions, their scent, their leg length, their passivity or assertiveness, all of which are crudely paralleled, through language, with animals.