During my last year or so of grad school at MICA, I was working on coming up with a thesis that would allow me to explore much of what I had been pursuing the previous 3 years, which was how to undo some of the socially embedded gendering to which we are subjected. Stories have for centuries often been the delivery system of that gendering and so I decided to focus on fairy tales and stories to see what I could discover.
Many of the stories I’d read years ago~ like Treasure Island, Moby Dick, Toilers of the Sea, The Three Musketeers, etc.~ are unabashedly for boys and all of the activity centers around how men behave in groups, their moral codes, and an emphasis on brotherhood. I wondered what the art would look like if the a story was instead written about women as the main characters—swashbucklers, mutineers, and adventurers— and so this and many other images for my thesis developed where I swapped genders but maintained the storyline.
Here you can see the small differences between the idea and the finished work.
Some of the questions I think the image raises:
If women abuse (or murder) their oppressors, does it absolve them of wrongdoing or are they behaving just as badly as their male counterparts? Do two wrongs make a right? And of course, given that these are women of color gives us more insight into how they’re perceived and policed more harshly for retaliatory actions.
Can a person whose gender is fluid be easily shown in a drawing or painting?
Can the male gaze ever be thwarted? Should we concern ourselves with this at all now that women are prominent writers, filmmakers, and artists? And subcontextually, does the lesbian gaze have the same power or is it mitigated by the very fact that lesbians are women and of similar status?
An additional bit of trivia about this piece is that I used no blue pigments. The palette was limited to earth pigments— ochre, and burnt umber; the burnt sienna is the color of the masonite showing through. Black and white made the greys and the blues.
Do you have questions about this painting? Please leave your comment below and I’ll be sure to respond. And thanks for reading!