How to make the bridge?

For the past year my work has concerned the female form and feminist theory. The American feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, whose writings on gender performativity, monogamy, and the construct of heterosexuality have greatly influenced the development of my work. (Her book, Gender Trouble, analyzes these issues in depth). I began to examine what roles I perform in my everyday life and what aspects of myself, as a woman, may in fact be inherent. During the same time I was researching Judith Butler, I was exposed to the work of the artist Mary Coble. Coble's work combines performance and video documentation. Her performance piece, "Binding Ritual" inspired me to make "Squeeze," which was part of a portrait series I was working on at the time.

Over the summer I began thinking more about ideals, cultural approproation, and the transformation of human flesh over time. Ancient Greek scupltures served as the physical embodiement for cultural ideals. "Perfect" human beings were carved out of marble and placed on fluted columns. They were gods among the masses. However, these imposed figures were highly deformed, anatomically unrealistic and disproportionate. I began to wonder, are these arhetypes any different than than the modern day superhumans we aspire to be like today? Has anything changed and will we ever escape the self depricating cyle? How do we as a culture take and borrow to suit our own sadistic needs? Playboy entered the picture and I began researching the anothology that covered fifty years of publications and the gross metamorphosis of the female form over time.

It was apparent that as the decades passed, the image of "woman" and what construes the Playboy Bunny, became more plastic, more cold, and more sexually explicit. As the appearce of flesh diminished along with tan lines, cellulite and freckles, the women became more like hollow statues, not so different than those created by the Greeks centuries ago. So where have we arrived at as a culture? How have we transformed aesthetic ideals into products? The materialization of flesh and the commericalization of the female form ignited my interest in cultural appropriation and how we as a culture find ourselves attracted to and manipulating cultures and ideologies we know nothing about. I have just recently begun comining images of appropriated cultures (embodied by landscapes) and images of women from Playboy publications.

I'm not exactly sure how I will marry my ideas and source material for my work in the studio with the work I am doing in multimedia. I hope to create a correlation between the two, or at least work that supports each other.