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Weekly Blog

Welcome to Venison's Weekly Blog! Here you will find advice, show reviews, thoughts and short articles by the Venison Team. We welcome your input comments and thoughts in return! 
​Thanks for reading Venison Magazine!

Quarterly

Meager Form, work by Camilla Taylor

1/4/2017

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​Meager Form
Work by Camilla Taylor
@camillataylor

​ Reception | January 13th, 2017 | 5:30 pm

Penny Contemporary
187 Liverpool Street
Hobart Tasmania, Australia
pennycontemporary.com.au
​@pennycontemporary

Photos by Mike Reynolds
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I won't tell you // unglazed stoneware, linseed oil, graphite // 7" x 9" x 6" // 2016
How often do we get out work done a week or so early? Not often, in my experience. Luckily Camilla completed her works for Meager Form early, and we got to reap the benefits. Here's a look into my studio visit with her!
Meager Form is comprised of sculptures and collographs that depict the relationship between strength and vulnerability. Camilla, who has been greatly influenced by TS Eliot for this series, spoke with me for about an hour and we discussed everything from art, to neighbors, family and social trends.

Preview by Nazish Chunara

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You will always hesitate // stoneware, graphite, linseed oil, synthetic hair, wrought iron, stainless steel // 34" x 43" x 4" // 2016
​Camilla used her own hands as a guide for these sculptures and was able to vary them in size and gesture. They're beautfully depicted, all the way down to the lines in the palms which are curiously detailed. The weight of hands versus the weight of hair provide a little fight. You only have parts of a body to create an identity, if that's even what you want to do. Camilla's works are intentionally left unidentified which leaves ample room for wonder. Whose body could be attached to these hands or feet or braid of hair? It could be yours, mine, your professor's, maybe your mom from a few years ago or the hand of someone you have yet to meet. It's pretty magical to think about.
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You will always hesitate (detail)
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You will always hesitate (detail)
Though these limbs leave room for you to elaborate on, they are also representative of the things we potentially have in common. We're all ideally born with ten fingers and a set of life lines to get our palms read. ​The exploration of identity is high right now, which makes Camilla's works stand out even more. There is no eye color, shape, finger nail, or skin color to point out and run with.
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Grasp // lost wax cast pewter // 6.5" x 3.5" x 3" // 2016
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Grasp // lost wax cast pewter // 6.5" x 3.5" x 3" // 2016
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Grasp // lost wax cast pewter // 6.5" x 3.5" x 3" // 2016
Alternatively, there's is much security to be found in There is space all around you. Wrapped in itself, these feet are kept warm, cozy and safe. It's like creating a personal bubble; there's space for yourself provided by yourself, which immeditely led me to the idea of the imporance of self care.

We can have our heads in the clouds, just as long as our feet are on the ground - isn't that how it goes? Camilla's works trigger a number of varying thoughts to tinker with.
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There is space all around you // lost wax cast pewter, synthetic hair // 25" x 14" x 4.5" // 2016
Reminicent of etchings, the prints below were made through the process of collography. The images are carved onto board, covered in ink and transfered onto paper. This was my first experience with it. Of course, I asked her if she ever considered incorporating color (I bet she's gotten that one too many times.) I realized that it's unnecessary because the texture created with this technique is so deep, that they are extremely vibrant as is.
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Hang limp // collograph on cotton rag paper // 42" x 30" // edition of 2 // 2016
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Look away 2 // collograph on cotton rag paper // 42" x 30" // edition of 2 // 2016
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Gathered hair // relief print on kozo paper // ed. of 3 // 50" x 11" // 2016
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Hair in a braid // relief print on kozo paper // ed. of 3 // 50" x 11" // 2016
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Loosening braid // relief print on kozo paper // ed. of 3 // 50" x 11" // 2016
Meager Form ships off to Penny Contemporary this week. If you have the chance, I recommend saying hello to Camilla and checking out the work personally! 
PS, Camilla has a new system of screen printing and it's with watercolor. Check out the following piece, along with many others in With Liberty and Justice for Some at Walter Maciel Gallery  Los Angeles, starting  January 7th, 2017.
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Thank you for having me over Camilla!
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Tokens, Gold, and Glory - Q&A with Wendy Red Star

7/27/2016

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Picture
Installation view of Wendy Red Star’s Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.
Tokens, Gold, & Glory

​Hap Gallery -Portland, OR 
July 14–August 28, 2016
Artist’s Talk: July 30, 2:00pm

Interview by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner

PictureInstallation view of Wendy Red Star’s Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.
Walking into Hap Gallery in Portland I was immediately confronted with several golden and headless deer forms on a field of perfect astroturf. The deer reflected the gallery lights and glowed like some strange iconic figures from a byzantine painting.  Despite the glitziness of the golden forms, everything in the room felt sinister in its simplicity. Golden plastic streamers mimicked how blood would have spilled from the open wound of the headless decoys and was dramatically draped in contrast to the Astroturf covered floor. I found myself drawn into strange details of the installation like the bar running through the deer’s’ hind legs, and the little golden bows that tied the plastic streamers in place. 

Climate change and human led extinction has been on my mind lately, which is perhaps why Red Star’s show spoke to me in such powerful and sinister ways.  I have been seeing more and more work by young and emerging artist (myself included) that heavily references hunting trophies. Tokens, Gold and Glory spoke to me in contrast to this trend, about what is left behind and what is wasted. As in her earlier works that I admire, in her new installation at Hap Gallery she brings up how plastic our vision of the world is. Red Star brings to light our wasteful inclinations by literally sensationalizing what is left behind in our relationship with nature and within our own cultures.

Red Star took the time last week to speak to me about her installation at Hap Gallery and about her art practice.  
 
I’ve been thinking a lot about themes of exploration and exploitation and how they’re wrapped up into the same ball. Your installation at Hap has got me thinking more about gold as part of the root of both. Gold is the predominate color in your installation, but in its simplicity it holds so much historical connotation. You have worked with decoys in  your past work, but I am curious how you came to the decision to use Gold?

Gold is so loaded. It comes with all this baggage. When you see it, automatically you think of rich, money, prestige, or it can also come off as being tacky.  So for me it was really about indulgence and going over the top in showing off your resources. The best way to do that would be gold.  It covers up all the ugly things too. I mean, headless deer with streamers coming out that very much look like guts and blood… but as long as it’s gold it really covers up all of that up. I also feel that gold represents greed.

​ This installation is one of my most emotional pieces. Not that I get emotional over it, but I notice when people view it gives them an emotion right off the bat, a kind of visceral reaction to it which is a lot of fun to see because I’ve never made anything that I know that’s done that so directly. I think it’s a combination of all of those loaded things that are within the installation.

Do you think the cultural weight of gold has changed through history? Do you consider gold as a color to be a kind of cheap form cultural escapism or more of a constant and powerful symbol?

You know what, I think it is a constant. I think it’s a place that people are trying to attain. Coming from a very poverty stricken community, or even coming from Black culture you see gold chains and things like that… It may have lost power in the white manifold but I think for minorities it’s still something that hasn’t been attained. It’s GOLD! You see it in things like jewelry and if you have it, it means you’re rich! So, it’s definitely a comment on capitalism.  It’s about how far removed we are in trading off resources for something else, or being in a power position where it means nothing to you to have gold all the time. Looking at it in all directions, that’s how I’m thinking about gold. It represents all those things. 
 
Astroturf is the other big component of your installation. Everything in your installation is fake. Are you making a comment on human’s perceptions of nature as a commodity, or are you trying to simulate the feeling of being in a natural space?

I’d go with the first statement. I think this is what’s nice about this installation. I wanted people to be accountable to go in there and be one step away from being on a pedestal themselves with those deer.  People will do their entire yards in Astroturf, or you’ll see their porches with Astroturf and it represents having a green lawn. If you have a green lawn that means you’re doing well in society. It represents the American dream. Astroturf is like gold, it has a lot of ties to it, but it also can be very tacky.

Someone can walk away from that installation saying it’s really kitschy and funny and tacky, or they can dive into it deeper and really think about how we’re trading natural resources for fake resources. We’re trying to attain something but maybe were going about it using fake things to make it seem like we’ve reached that certain status. We’re off base. Were so far removed from nature that we kind of get some satisfaction being around fake nature.  
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Installation view of Wendy Red Star’s Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.

"We're so far removed from nature that we kind of get some satisfaction being around fake nature."  

PictureInstallation view of Wendy Red Star’s Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.
From something simple like maintaining a garden, to the more absurd like manufacturing fake grasses and animals, humans constantly try to simulate and control nature. How does your traditional Crow background and historical research inform your work about our relationship with nature as well as the false nature we manufacture? How has growing up on the reservation affected the way you are watching this manufacturing process happen?

I think there are things that are placed on us, like the grouping of all native people and that we’re all the same, which isn’t true. I’m very specific about wanting to be known as Crow because that’s what Native American means to me. I don’t know what it’s like to be a Lakota person for instance, and then there’s the whole “one with nature” thing.  I guess what I’m getting at is cultural assimilation.

Cultural assimilation is something that has happened to any person of color in this country. They’ve always been forced into being assimilated in attaining these certain things to make you mainstream. I talked about having that perfect yard with the perfect grass cut a certain way earlier, and that does not exist on the reservation. The whole idea of yard is really nonexistent. The concept of a yard as a status symbol is one of the things that I noticed when I left the reservation. Obviously I had a white mother and she had a yard, but living here in Portland I notice more of the obsessive nature of people in their yard. There is no concept of having a yard on the reservation as being a measure of success, but I feel it’s definitely a measure here in Portland in some way. It’s a statement. Those are the sorts of things I’m pulling in.

I’m also talking about poverty too. This sculpture installation looks fancy, and the reason it looks fancy is because of gold. I’m always using really cheap materials, but it’s a fantasyland that people find themselves just going down in. Then they realize “This is totally fake! But wait a minute, I’m enjoying going into this sort of fantasy land”. I think that happens a lot in our society with us trying to have different statuses. I’m thinking of people of color trying to reach a certain status that is placed upon them. It’s capitalism basically.

Are there any particular points or specific people in history that inform your work?

You know, for me, it really is my childhood and my experiences growing up on the Crow reservation in Montana. I end up remembering experiences that I had which totally seemed normal and just the way things were done there. But now that I am living off the reservation I’ll reflect on some thing and wonder, “What does that actually mean?” I never questioned it then because there was no need to when I was living it. Now I need to know, and often when I have that question, it leads me to very interesting places and research.

So for instance with a new exhibition I'm working on, I’m going to title it “No Water District”. When I was 16 I was the tribe's No Water District Princess, and I didn’t question it until now. I wanted to know what that meant. There are different districts on the reservation, and one of them is No Water District. I represented that area and the people that lived there, and my grandma lived there. My tribe is matrilineal so everybody followed the mother’s side, so I followed my grandmother’s side. To me it was in honor of her that I represented that district, but now I have more questions.  My childhood is attached to this very rich and interesting history which is Crow, but also this overarching umbrella of native American history which rarely gets talked about and isn’t taught in public schools and only in special classes in college. That’s why I’m so interested in it.
 
Do you ever find surprises in your research that drive your work in a different direction?

Yeah, it’s almost like a domino effect, one thing just kind of leads to another. I did this exhibition on Medicine Crow who is one of our chiefs. Growing up on the reservation I know Medicine Crow descendants, there’s a street there named after him and all this stuff. After leaving the reservation I kept running into all these photos of him, actually the same two photos. They were put on books and used commercially, and other artist who were not crow were making portraits using that image. It was this weird thing where I had left the reservation, but somehow medicine crow was always around, which was comforting because he was from my tribe. I mean, I could just could go to Whole Foods and get Honest Tea, because he was on Honest Tea. 

But who was this company? I mean they don’t know anything about Medicine Crow. They’re just using him because he’s a very classic looking native chief, but that’s as far as it goes. They’re just using him as this brand to represent something to get people to buy their tea. I kept running across him on native spirit books and all this kind of crazy stuff so then I just decided well, lets ask the bigger question and lets shine some light on it. What happened that day in 1880 when he sat down and someone took that photo?

This led me into this really rich research project where I learned all sorts of things. The reason why that photo was taken is because he went to Washington D.C.  in 1880 with 5 other chiefs when the government was trying to take a large chunk of our territory. That image was a delegation photo that the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief photographer took of Medicine Crow wearing his finest outfit, stating what kind of war deeds he did.  He’s wearing these cute little things in his hair that are called hair bows and in order for him to wear those he had to slice peoples throats. He has fur ermine strips on his shirt and leggings that meant he had to capture horses and steal guns, and these are things that no one knows because that’s all been lost in history. I ended up going all over the whole photograph in red pen and writing in what each of those things mean. I wanted to have that picture speak back to you instead of it just being this image that you could fantasize and place it where ever you wanted, like on native spirit books.

To me that was a really fun project and a way for me to actually learn things I didn't even know. I ended up being able to go through the collections at the Portland art museum and see all sorts of beautiful crow beadwork and that lead me to be to able to talk to historians and become interested in other things. To me that’s what makes my art fulfilling and engaging. It’s making me grow and learn and takes me to unexpected places.

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Installation view of Wendy Red Star’s Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.

"I decided I was no longer going to say no to art.
​I’m always going to say yes to art. "

PictureWendy Red Star with her Installation of Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.
Many of our readers, like myself, are emerging artist who make art and still work one or two jobs. Do you still have a day job? If not, how did you transition to art full time?

This is the first year I’ve been sustaining myself on just my practice, which is really intense and scary, and also forces me to think a lot differently about the work that I’m making. There’s a lot more vulnerability to it because I don’t have anything to fall back on. Previously, and for the longest time, I’ve always had a job. Initially I was teaching, and a then there was a stint for about year where I was the manager at a state park in Montana. I worked for about 3 years at a non-profit arts organization that gave grants to artists. That was really nice to see the back end of how that works, and to demystify that whole process.

What happened with my transition? Well, over the last 3 years I had a lot of big life events that happened, and so I just decided “I’m going to go full force into Art now”.

While I was working at the nonprofit I would take all my vacation and sick time and use that toward doing art, giving lectures and any travel that I had to do. Then I ran out of sick time. I remember I had this moment in my cubicle where I did a very silent cry. There were  going so many things going on but ultimatley I was offered to go to Russia and work wouldn’t let me go. I was like “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” You know, did a little cry in my cubicle that no one heard. No one even knew it happened.  From there, I decided I was no longer going to say no to art. I’m always going to say yes to art. My second year at the job I started taking unpaid time off. I was getting paid more to do Lectures than missing those few days from work… And then in my third year I got laid off.

Well that’s a force of change....

Yeah... The third year just wasn’t working for me anyway. It was really difficult to come back from visiting institutions and being treated like a professional and being paid really well to speak or put on an exhibition and then come to my little cubicle and do admin work. I was working up the courage to ask to go part time, because my job was just starting to affect my career negatively.  Luckily when the company decided to go virtual they removed my position.

That was so scary. I didn’t think I was at a point where I could just sustain myself, but it was exactly what I needed. I needed to be pushed off a cliff and I think it would have been bad to have just gone part time. The way my life is working, there’s just no room for a job. I fill my days up and my schedule is totally booked. I can’t even envision how it would even be possible to work a job now.

I think a lot of artists just need a push too. I created that sort of safety net of a job where I knew I could make rent every month without realizing it was holding me back from really investing in my career. Now that I don’t have that safety net there are things I’m doing things to make it sustainable for myself.

​I have my own corporation now, and pay myself and my health insurance through the corporation. I’ve got a tax preparator and an accountant and I sit down with them and make sure all my ducks are in a row. I also try to be really being smart about the work, like who buys it and how it’s editioned. With the day job I just wasn’t taking it all as seriously as I am now that I’m running a functional, sustaining business. I’m just in the very beginning stages of learning all this stuff and it’s great. This is my favorite thing to talk to other artists about. Not really the artwork, but the business side of stuff. It’s new to me but I’m really into it.


PictureInstallation view of Wendy Red Star’s Tokens, Gold and Glory // Photo by Danielle Schlunegger-Warner.
Tokens, Gold and Glory
July 14th - August 28 2016
Artist’s Talk: July 30, 2:00pm

Wendy Red Star
Instagram @Wendyredstar 

Hap Gallery opened November, 2013 to show contemporary artists, explore curatorial issues, and experiment with gallery practices. Hap works to build bridges between artists and their audiences, and to engage new and experienced collectors.

916 NW Flanders Street
Portland, Oregon 97209
503.444.7101
hapgallery.com
Instagram @hapgallery
Tuesday through Saturday,
11:00 to 6:00pm

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Holiday Spotlight: Jennifer Huang and Danielle Schlunegger

12/17/2015

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This weeks Holiday Spotlight is to introduce to you two of our Freelance Journalists
who are artists, relighting history in this modern day with their art.
Jennifer Chen-Su Huang, @hepoosclouds
and
Danielle Schlunegger, @naturalistandco

Jennifer Chen-Su Huang

​​As many of you may know, Venison Magazine was established by an art collective known as Weeknight Rodeo, which was comprised of UC Berkeley graduates which Jennifer was invited to be part of. The collective evolved into Venison Magazine, allowing her to continue contributing to conversations on contemporary art, but this time as a Freelance Journalist.
​She received her BA in Practice of Art with Honors from University of California, Berkeley and is currently an MFA student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying Fiber and Materials. Jennifer creates installations using various materials that discuss the role of art and how it is perceived differently, depending on whether it has been created by a man or a woman.
​
Here's a look into her work:


​Has writing for Venison influenced your art in any way?

I'm not sure that it has especially influenced my art making, but being a part of Venison has shown me the importance of staying connected with other artists and encouraging one another to further their practice -- because it's easy to be disheartened in this field.
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Jennifer with a work in progress.
"...Venison has shown me the importance of staying connected with other artists and encouraging one another..."

​Your focus is primarily on the process and why women's works are considered craft and men's, art. What have you discovered along the way?

My interest in dismantling the hierarchy between craft and art are connected to conversations in feminism. I'm currently studying both Western and Eastern cultural definitions of "feminine" and how contemporary literary and visual artists have reclaimed these terms. I've been referring to cultural theorists and feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. I'm discovering that my art making is motivated by lived experience and is autobiographical in the sense that I am reconsidering the heavily patriarchal Christian and Confucian values I was raised in.


When you take a look at her work, you can't help but notice the color palette immediately, which I asked her about.
"I often gravitate towards muted pastel colors because I find them to be non-threatening, humble, childish, and playful. I also tend to use flesh tones in general, I think, because of my interest in the body and its futility. I'm drawn to the human body as a humble organism.

More recently, I've been using bright pinks as well because it is associated with being low brow or overly saccharine. It's unsophisticated and also maybe a bit repulsive, like pepto-bismol. I see a relationship between my use of pink and my interest in socially ascribed feminine traits -- wet, dark, fragmented, negative, etc. I want to uplift pink's status by subverting the negative implications associated with femininity."
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An image of a work in progress, from Jennifers studio.
I really enjoy reading what Jennifer contributes as one of our writers and even more so, enjoy seeing how she translates such an incredible study into a work of art. Her work is always so in depth, which I know we can all appreciate. You can get a closer look into her practice, on our blog, ​The secretions we keep secret.

Danielle Schlunegger

Danielle Schlunegger has taken fine art to a whole new level. She has studied naturalist Marcus Kelli and has taken it upon herself to recreate his own studies, turning science and history into art so we can better understand his research. She grew up amongst the shell shops and sand dunes of Ventura, CA. Currently working and living in Oakland CA, her artwork is strongly influenced by 18th century Cabinets of Curiosity and early explorers. Danielle graduated from California College of Arts in 2010 with distinction, receiving the All College Honors award for her work on The Marcus Kelli Collection. 
When did you decide to join Venison?
I wanted to get involved with Venison after Amber and I became friends and I got to know all the people working on the magazine. Everyone involved creates such a supportive community for each other and I wanted to help contribute and be involved in that support system. 

You were interviewed by Amber in the Autumn of 2014. What is it like going from being interviewee to interviewer?
Being interviewed by Venison was a huge confidence boost. The idea that someone liked my work enough to want to put the time into promoting me was very validating and it opened a lot of doors for me. Getting to interview other artists has been a really valuable networking tool and a way for me to promote the artwork I admire while giving other artists the same kind of validation.
Picture
Danielle Schlunegger
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A hand built, working reproduction of a camera that would've been used by naturalist Marcus Kelli. Part of The Marcus Kelli Collection.
I asked Danielle if she was a full time artist. It surely seems so with all the work she's been producing.
I work with my hands pretty much all day, even though I do have to have a day job. I work in a wood shop making panels and stretcher bars for other artists. My day job has opened up a lot of great connections and friendships. I like to think of my self as a full time artist, just with many different jobs: Having day job to pay for my studio/supplies/ groceries etc, making the actual art, promoting my art and upcoming shows, looking and applying for opportunities, and maintaining a good family and friend life outside of making art. 
Do you have any advice or tips for emerging artists?
I think having a group of friends who are artists who push each other to keep making art is really something to hold on to. Have a good website that is easy to navigate--more people will see an image of your work online than they will in person. I'm also always a fan of keeping business cards on you all the time. You never know when you'll need them. ​​
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Stories of an Outsider in Nature, a portable museum space used to help explore the life of Marcus Kelli, 2012-2013.
You can read Danielle's interview with Amber in the Autumn 2014 issue of Venison to get an in depth look into her art.
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the secretions we keep secret: on liquid language and female consciousness in contemporary art

4/25/2015

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by jennifer chen-su huang
I was in fifth grade when I got my first period. I came home from school, cracked open my textbook, grabbed chips from the pantry, and started simultaneously munching and working on problems #8-24, even only. As my mechanical pencil scratched away, my focus was interrupted by a quiet warm moistness in between my legs. I put down my pencil and walked over to the bathroom, where lo and behold, I found a red poppy emblazoned in the lining of my underwear. I peered between my thighs into the toilet bowl where a drop of blood began to flower in the crystal clear water. Entranced, I watched my blood taint the pristine toilet water in soft silky ribbons. Finally I wiped, pulled up my pants, and waddled to my mom’s study. “I think my butt is having a nosebleed," I said in Taiwanese. We walked to the bathroom together and I showed her the poppy flower stain on the seat of my underpants. She pulled out a baby pantiliner from the medicine cabinet and gave it to me. “Sorry,” she said, as she rustled the top of my head. 

Eight years later, in art school, I would find a rising grin on my face whenever someone labeled my work as “visceral." I aimed for visceral because I was searching for something to identify with, something that speaks of shame and base humanity. At the time, I didn’t quite know it, but I was beginning to embrace these buried subjects and uncommon conceptions of femininity.

As a female artist, my work is linked to my experiences - as a daughter whose gender disappointed her grandparents, as a subordinate whose sexuality is shamed and silenced. These experiences are not personal, rather they are continually perpetuated upon the female sex. Since ancient Greece, we’ve seen female genitals erased to Barbie-like blanks whereas their male counterparts are accentuated with detail and accuracy. In our patriarchal culture, female sexuality has become symbols of shame, synonymous with irrationality and chaos. [1] At the same time however, an unrealistic sense of female sexuality is also desired and objectified - women are no longer human but clean and smooth commodities made ready for consumption, much like the ancient Greek vulva-less statues. When held to such ideals, women are driven to wax, to bleach, to surgically alter, but what is gained by submitting to patriarchal paragons? [2]

I’m interested in artists who subvert these perverse ideals of feminine beauty and virtue, who wholly accept their femininity, who accept that as daughters and mothers, we bleed, we lactate, we get wet. We’re taught to be ashamed of our bodily fluids, but our fluids sustain life. 

Having read the art criticisms of Chris Kraus, I became immersed in the recent article written by Leslie Jamison on the author, published in the New Yorker. The article includes a review on one of Kraus’ books, I Love Dick, where the art critic, David Rimanelli, describes the book as “not so much written as secreted.” Secretion, Jamison states, “evokes the book’s bodily admissions… as well as the liquid language often applied to female writing about the self: gushing, vomiting, purging, bleeding.” As I read this sentence, I realized female visual artists also create works in the same liquid language. This repeating fluid imagery made clear to me why I felt such an urge to create “visceral” work in college and why I was drawn to certain female artists.

There’s an unapologetic quality to the works of Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, and Jeanne Dunning. They readily embrace the bodily and are unafraid of the fluids that society is uncomfortable confronting.
Picture
Marlene Dumas - Head Rest, 2001
In Marlene Dumas’ Head Rest (2001), the female figure embodied in watered-down pigment is soft and suggestive. The same words can be used to describe depictions of Rococo women. Unlike them, however, Dumas’ female is not rendered realistically, though she feels much more real than the women in Boucher and Fragonard’s paintings. [3] While their women's rosy cheeks and plush lips are carefully manicured onto the canvas, Dumas’ figure simply exists, she is secreted by brush, birthed from water and pigment. She feels loose and viscous, but her stance is rooted and unashamed, her being a collision of gray and pink ink. 

Similarly, Tracey Emin takes the female form and simplifies it to the most honest and essential strokes. Hers is not perfected - a quick movement of the brush to outline the woman. In Untitled (Purple Virgin Sketch) (2004), Emin draws a mysterious female figure, who is both flimsy yet bold, fluid yet straightforward. The darkest point in the picture lies in between her legs, and only from there does the viewer make out the most defined stroke on the page - her leg and foot. It is from this dark purple epicenter that one sees the woman. From the soft individual hairs to the larger scribble of unidentifiable pigment, perhaps either shadow or bodily fluid, the densest parts of the minimal picture reveal and highlight the subject’s gender. Here the figure is presented unabashed by her what society deems her darkness, by her fluidity and her fluids.
Picture
Tracey Emin - Untitled (Purple Virgin Sketch), 2004
Like Dumas and Emin, Louise Bourgeois creates watercolors in a liquid language. Her paintings freely bleed between lines. They are not confined nor restricted by feminine idealizations, but rather they wholly embody the feminine in form and technique. The Good Mother (2007) features matronly breasts that envelop the page. Rendered in a deep red, they drip and bleed into the damp paper. Her nipples barely graze the child below. The child shares the same blood red pigment; it is an extension of the mother. Arms and legs outstretched, the child’s wavy limbs bleed into the wetness of the paper and the wetness of the mother that embraces it. The picture is neither polished nor pretty, but its depiction of mother and child speaks to a truth that is tucked behind doors. This is the “good mother,” an image frequently occupied by the clean and pure, Virgin Mary, [4] but unlike the common icons of mother and child that saturate our society, Bourgeois’ mother is essentialized to breasts and blood. The liquid element of female bodies, of bleeding and lactating mothers, is not hidden but celebrated in The Good Mother.
Picture
Louise Bourgeois - The Good Mother, 2007
Using the same liquid language, Jeanne Dunning photographs subjects that both draw and disgust. In The Blob 3 (1999), the female subject lies on white sheets embracing the oozing viscous blob that extends from her body. She lies with her eyes closed, seemingly tranquil, even as the viewers’ initial reaction may be one of recoil. As viewers, perhaps we’ve been conditioned to react with repulsion at bodily fluids, especially those that are distinctly feminine. Dunning’s photograph, however, has the viewer questioning the flesh-colored substance that extends from the subject’s body. We become entranced by both its familiarity and its foreignness – familiar because we understand it as a fluid that we may secret and keep secret and foreign because we have never seen it publicized outside our private realms. Are we uncomfortable? And if so, why is the female being photographed so at ease compared to us, the viewer who recoils in disgust? These questions raised by the secreted fluid direct our attention to our source of shame. The image becomes unsettling when the woman whose fluids we see is not embarrassed like we expect. Rather, Dunning’s subject is calm – calm because she accepts her liquid extension, calm because she is comfortable in her skin.
Picture
Jeanne Dunning - The Blob 3, 1999
The natural secretions of female bodies are often kept secret because they are identified with dishonor and disgust. But by embracing and re-appropriating these symbols of shame and repugnance, the artists, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, and photographer, Jeanne Dunning, celebrate the female body in all its forms. Inspired by the artists who came before me, I sought to create work that felt honest and bodily. I yearned for the visceral because it represented to me my femininity that society saw as ugliness. Finally I understand, I was fighting the reaction of shame and sorrow and embracing the initial awe and fascination that I encountered when my blood first hit the water. 


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[1] By our patriarchal culture, I am referring to both Western culture at large and Eastern Confucian culture.

[2] These thoughts were inspired by Syreeta McFadden’s reflections upon visiting the Greek and Roman Galleries in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in the Guardian.
[3] I’m thinking of Francois Boucher’s Diana Leaving the Bath (1742) and Jean-Honore Fragonard’s The Swing (1767).
[4] I’m picturing Italian Renaissance painter, Raphael’s Madonna and Child (1503).

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