Parts
What is womanhood?
What is femininity?
Who has a right to define it the feminine and who has the right to gatekeep?
What are the aspects, the PARTS of the female identity, and how is it appropriate to rely on parts for a social identity? What is the cost of taking on a label without taking the time to define and explore a construct, and what does it mean to take on an identity without doing the work to find the self within the label?
A deconstruction, observation, and reconstruction of the parts meant to represent and encompass the label “female” and the idea of the feminine.
In the age of AI where we’ve outsourced sexism, gender roles, and gender norms to computers to regurgitate back to us as answers to questions within a view of society created by the narrow minds of toxic masculinity, what does “female” mean?
The first stage of being. A first contact point with the outside world, a pathway into life. A site of patriarchal control, a frontier made to exert control in war and in "peace". A site of objectification of the feminine form, a gateway of control over the definition of the feminine. A part of the often deconstructed whole.
9 in × 12 in
Acrylic on paper
The male gaze, the lens through which media is produced, AI is written, through which we are drawn to live and exist. It breaks the whole into parts, dehumanizing and making it easier to objectify.
9 in × 12 in
Acrylic on paper
From water is born life, the path, the channel through which life develops. The parts that are yet fully understood, the aspect that is co-opted by the mounting laws to limit choice, limit autonomy to choose how and when life is fostered. Drawing away this part to in an attempt to claim ownership over the feminine form, to anchor underneath the umbrella of patriarchal control.
9 in × 12 in
Acrylic on paper
The desire, the need, the sometimes necessity to split the self up into compartments, fractures, fragments in order to find a place within the confines of Society. Sometimes the act of belonging requires the unmaking of the self until it is left in parts unrecognizable to even the individual.
9 in × 12 in
Acrylic on paper
In the state of letting go. Letting go of expectations, releasing the hold of social pressures, giving space to find one's authentic, true definition of self. Freedom.
9×12
Acrylic on paper