Leslie Ann O'Dell (142)

-hungry-

-sublimation-

Leslie Ann writes:

I am at heart, an intuitive visual artist. I observe and create mostly with my camera. My work is emotional, tense, and a bit enigmatic for me. Centered around humans, nature, and my own identity...

Leslie Ann O'Dell

Theresa Pfarr (141)

-gushing-

-blisspriss-

-sugarlips-

-sequin-

-musthaves-

Theresa writes:

Incidentally and anxiously, I discover and draw from the meanderings of the female image in our culture, as it addresses me. I treat the cultural, commercial and personal as one in my work, through a process of collecting, collaging and manipulating images into my paintings. Elements coexist in the paintings to describe the anxiety associated with inhabiting a medial self consciousness.

Theresa Pfarr

Dara Herman-Zierlein (140)

-My Old Dancing Shoes-

-Cutting the Meat-

-My Happy Sleeping Vagina-

Dara writes:

In my current work I'm exploring the balancing act of being both an artist and a mother, expressing intense emotional feelings over the motherhood experience. As we are never prepared for the ever changing mandates of tending to young children, my theme is constantly changing as the demands of motherhood change.

I like to share my pictures of myself struggling in the daily mundane routines of being a mother and find relief in painting what I am feeling at the time. I am hoping that other women will see my art, feel a connection and that will create peace of mind as they see themselves in me.

Dara Herman-Zierlein

Super Mom Unveiled

Joelle Circé (139)

Joelle adds:

In this piece I address how for many women, we fight with body image issues, and often deal with self-loathing as a result of being told by media that there is but one acceptable body type (often photoshopped to the X degree). It is the breaking of that mirror of how we perceive ourselves, also the not wanting to see our bodies and maybe even the break from all the stereotypes we are constantly being bombarded with about women's bodies.

Joelle Circé

Aya Rosen (138)

-Shadow Box, The Women House-

ayarosen.tumblr

Sonja Benskin Mesher RCA UA (137)

1. Face.

face.

face the fear,

face the process.

talk face to face,

move on.

2. Life.

has left me

leaning

slightly

3. Two

is it you,

is it

still you?


Images and Words by:

Sonja Benskin Mesher RCA UA

Video

Jennifer R. A. Campbell (136)

Jennifer adds:

When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of her beauty. – Pope Gregory I

There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out. – Mae West

I love bad girls; subversive, naughty, totally thrilling girls. I love to paint bad girls. I can never imagine a truly dangerous woman – and I mean that in the best possible sense - being ashamed of her body.

Jennifer R. A. Campbell

Elinor Carucci (135)

From "A limited glimpse into my most recent body of work, my children."

Elinor Carucci

Marsha Parrilla (134)

'Gris' Conceived and Performed by: Marsha Parrilla

Piece created for: THE BODY-NOTHING ELSE

Marsha Parrilla's company website:

danzaorganica

Inspired by a world where technology binds people in unprecedented ways, Marsha Parrilla (Boston) and Omar Robles (Chicago), two Puerto Rican exiled artists, decided to create a virtual movement dialogue through video.
binariusdance

Helen Payne (133)

-bather-
(the urge to push)

-standing nude-
(the urge to push)

-untitled-
(the urge to push)

Helen writes:

Birth is among our most dramatic and transformative experiences and yet it is seldom depicted in art. Women, who have been under the microscope in the history of art, are left undepicted when giving birth. It is a rich vein, filled with drama, questions of identity, mystery, joy and sexuality. These works (The Urge to Push) seek to explore this uncharted territory. It is happy art that sticks a finger in the eye of the male gaze and sexualized depictions of women.

Helen Payne

Mimi Shapiro (132)

wrestling the volcano!! altered book:

-wrestling the volcano!! altered book collage, watercolor and wax, spreads from the book !-

Mimi writes:

on January 25th 2011 fell and broke my ankle on a volcano in Auckland NZ. here are a few of the photos and the book that i made ! to document the ordeal - it was an interesting learning experience ! in patience....since after surgery ! i could not walk on the ankle for 7 weeks....

mimi shapiro

Billie J. Maciunas (131)

To what great history
does she refer when she answers
the moon’s terrible pull
with rage and torment
that the earth will not swallow her yet

not the history of multiplication
but maybe of single numbers
she is a straw in the smoke bitten
wind.

©billie late 70s


Songs to dead lovers:

if you have not consented to be my lover
I claim you still
like a cold and killing envelope of snow
over all hope of new growth’s promise

but you consumed by the fierce heat
of elemental will to vanish boldly
elude my crude grasp
you must be an innocent birth
and my death the center of your
blazing heart

©billie 1979


Last Will and Testament:

All that matters is the skeleton. If
In ideal repose, fetal is good--
protective, like Aztec child mummies.
But if flatly forced, let the box be simple
pine. Fast feast of deathly horror, and
eternal peaceful noble bones.
Don’t embalm me. Give my living parts
to the living. Remember me
in your movements, your best unguarded
expressions, as I do you.

©billie 02

Martha Wilson (130)

Growing Old, July 15, 2009.

My Authentic Self, 1974/2011

Before and After 1974/2008

Beauty and Beastly, 1974/2009.

(Images from 'I have become my own worst fear,' at P.P.O.W. gallery)

Excerpt from 'Martha Wilson: The Liminal Trickster,' by Lauren Bakst on BOMBLOG, 10/5:

Martha Wilson’s solo exhibition, "I have become my own worst fear," comprises a series of self portraits that repeatedly distort the self until any fixed notion of subjectivity has utterly dissolved. Spanning from 1974 to 2011, these works reveal Wilson through specific markers in time, and invite the viewer to imagine the lived space beyond each image. Through the juxtaposition of younger and older, of before and after, Wilson makes tangible the space between these captured moments. Her images seem to ask, how did time pass between then and now? Furthermore, what was the embodied experience of that passage? In Beauty and Beastly, a profile image of Wilson in 1974 is positioned adjacent to a profile image of Wilson in 2011, a portrait of the artist peering simultaneously backwards and forwards at herself in spite of and through time. Rather than to spiral into an unending cycle of self reflection and critique, when Wilson looks at herself, she also looks at the viewer, beckoning us to examine the value systems that shape our ways of seeing. Her image and text work invoke the expectations and preconceptions that are written and re-written on women’s bodies every day. The terms “beauty” and “beastly” applied by Wilson to the young and old images of herself reference the persistent intertwining of the personal and the political, bringing awareness to the cultural discourses that frame the female body.

(to read the entire post by Lauren Bakst, follow the link to BOMBLOG.)

Martha Wilson

Siglinde Kallnbach (129)

Siglinde Kallnbach's Performance during the Opening of her Solo Exhibition at Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen/Germany 2008/9

Link to Siglinde Kallnbach's international lifelong

"a performancelife"- project (since 2001):

empathy and solidarity for people suffering from cancer.

a performancelife-e. V. on fb


Siglinde Kallnbach

Amanda Rossmiller (128)

eternal expanse of white
stretches below
belly of a fish,
fitted under fat, pale bosoms
scored with deep blue veins
like a fine cheese
shoved in a shadowy corner
of la fromagerie

once ripened in youth
bursting with nectar tastes
sweet in the mouth of young
lovers
watch
as the fruit wrinkles
then puckers
when flies start to gather

plant saplings in thick, moist
soil
found below,
honeysuckle me home

©Amanda Rossmiller

Giustina Surbone (127)

Venus of Willendorf, oil on canvas 66"x44"

Ravaged, oil on canvas 32.5"x 26.5"

Eye of the Beholder, oil on canvas 60"x 44"


Giustina writes:

i am fat. i am thin. i am hurt. i am hiding. i am starving. i am dependent. i am self-medicating. i am out- of- control. i am obsessed with my body. i am repulsed when i look in the mirror. i am a distortion of myself. i am young. i am fecund. i am lush. i am round. i am soft. i am the object of your desire. i am powerful. i am a vessel through which life flows. i am the madonna. i am a distortion of myself. i am old. i am sagging. i am drooping. i am bent. i am barren. i am crumbling. i am cemented. i am unrecognizable. i am lonely. i am sick. i am invisible. i am a distortion of myself. i am searching. i am strong. i am bright. i am vital. i am loving. i am joyful. i am gentle. i am compassionate. i am charitable. i am brave. i am worthy. i am trustworthy. i am old. i am young. i am fat. i am thin. i am gay. i am straight. i am sick. i am well. i am rich. i am poor. i am self-accepting. i am peaceful. i am at peace.

Giustina Surbone

Nina Sobell (126)

Baby, Chickey!, performance in 1982.

Photo by Chris Shearer.

For the video of this performance and other performances, click here.


From the Exhibition catalog Nina Sobell, at Gallery AREA 53, 2008
Curated by Evelin Stermitz:

In her performance art video Hey! Baby Chickey Nina Sobell appears nude playing with a raw cooking chicken. With a few simple manipulations, she eradicates the cultural distance between mother and woman as sexual being. Playing on the symbolic connection between food and sex, cooking is transformed into sexuality, but the involvement of the dead chicken pushes that sexuality towards bestiality and necrophilia. The scene is further complicated when the same chicken is given the role of baby. Sobell plays with the chicken, rocking it, holding it up by its arms as if teaching it to walk, and swinging it from breast to breast in what can only be described as a milking dance. This collapsing of the baby role with the chicken’s already established roles of dead animal, food material, and sexual object violates other taboos, including infanticide, cannibalism, and pedophilia.
Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996

Nina Sobell

Janet Culbertson (125)

-the large one-

How I feel ...

-odalisk fat-

I am trying to see the addition of extra pounds as classic rather than problematical.

I use the Ingres odalisque pose.

-In between-

Janet Culbertson

Evelin Stermitz (124)

SILENCE

experimental performative video

DV PAL/NTSC 2009

loop / total time 00:01:00:00

Sound by Elise Kermani, Ear Music, 2001.

Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.
(click image to view video)

Textual structures on body fragments as inscriptions on the female body of metaphorical injuries by rape violence are merging into an image of speechless suppression by male supremacy. Rape remains as a silent terror and global transgression, as a silent field of unspoken reality, because the afflicted women are broken.

This video work is created for FemLink The International Video Collages, on the collage theme of 'Aggression' for the year 2010.

WHITE BAND CUT

video performance

DV PAL/NTSC 2007

3 channel video

total time 00:09:25:00

Performance, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Special credits to Nina Sobell for access to her studio.

(click image to view video)

The ritualised cutting of a white band wrapped around the body symbolizes the metaphoric disposal of inner and outer bonds as restrictions in an internal monologue. The woman can be seen as a gift as well as a captive. The white band describes muted halcyon segues flowing in a void space.

evelinstermitz.net

artfem.tv

world-of-female-avatars.net