2013 Senior Art Thesis
Grace Lee
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ARTIST STATEMENT:
My artwork takes on a critical view of the social, political, and cultural impact on how we view womanhood and feminism. In my work I deconstruct how the female form is represented and fetishized in today’s society. I was inspired to explore this topic by a song lyric. In the song 212, Azealia Banks screams the provocative “I guess that cunt gettin’ eaten.” The word “cunt” has always been a word that people shy away from. To me, saying the lyric was a liberating experience. The song represented women’s liberation to me. In my early works, I tried to reappropriate the use of the word “cunt” and its inherent vulgarity. I also tried to make jokes about the word “cunt” to remove the negative power from it. While researching the visual history of feminism, I became influenced by many female painters, including Ida Applebroog, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gillian Carnegie, Carolee Schneemann, and Sylvia Sleigh. In my most recent works I started to realize the ugly misogyny in today’s culture. I started to move away from my comedic “cunt” paintings and dug deeper. My newest paintings are paintings of the bed sheet used in my piece, “We Serve the Best Meat in Town”. I created these pieces because there were some issues of censorship and self editing before the show. I wanted to make paintings that addresses my viewpoint and references proto feminist works. The skirt of the painting functions as entry in the bedroom and the woman’s body (in the tradition of Titian). It can also represent flesh.
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