Jessica Dunegan is an incredible artist from Charleston who currently resides in Boston. Her works have been displayed in numerous shows in the United States, and her art went through different stages over the years. At one point Jessica created a series of works titled Scrambled Porn. According to her, she has an issue with porn because “this media epitomizes and fosters a male-centered culture” and “contributes to the degradation of women” (“About Scrambled Porn”). The show at the Robert Lange Studios called the Other Side has nothing to do with porn; however, it continues to explore the issues contemporary women have to struggle with.
The Other Side presents a series of Jessica Dunegan's new resin paintings that are absolutely stunning. Her technique is very unique: she glues a photograph on transparency film to a wooden panel and pours epoxy resin on top of it. She then squeezes acrylic paint in the resin and allows it to dry. Once the resin is dry, Jessica paints on its surface to accentuate certain details. “This process is repeated many times to create physical dimension and a unique variety of opaque, transparent, and reflective materials” (“Jessica Dunegan”). The effect is amazing. I believe there are other artists who work with epoxy resin. However, this medium is not that wide spread, so Jessica Dunegan's works definitely stand out, especially in Charleston. The colors of the works are also wonderful. They are very bright and vibrant, especially on the paintings with feathered masks; there is a lot of red, green and yellow. The paintings in the show are relatively small with the largest ones being only 16”x20”.
I believe the gallery presented the works in the best possible way. They are in the room on the first floor. T...
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...ore resin. I think her resin paintings are much stronger and more effective just because they are so much more unique and unusual.
The Other Side is an amazing and very interesting show. Jessica Dunegan’s paintings draw the viewers in and leave a lasting impression; but they are not just a series of beautiful images. They also attract our attention to a very important topic: our obsession with beauty and being beautiful. Using tiaras, jewelry and feathered masks Jessica is making a statement that cannot be ignored.
Works Cited
“About Scrambled Porn.” JessicaDunegan.com. Jessica Dunegan. Web. 6 Feb 2014.
< http://www.jessicadunegan.com/art/statements/2>
"Jessica Dunegan." RobertLangeStudios.com. Robert Lange Studios. Web. 6 Feb 2014. .
“Panopticon.” OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries. Web. 6 Feb 2014.
In this comparison I will be comparing Russell Drysdale’s Maria (1950) a Sydney oil on canvas, 99x76.2 cm (NGA) to Guan Wei’s Dow: Island (2002) a synthetic polymer painting, 320x921 across 48 panels (NGA).
Black Women in Art Historically and currently African American women use art as a way to express themselves, their emotions and as an act of resistance. In this paper, I will discuss the various ways two very influential artists, Laurie Cooper and Lorna Simpson, use imagery to uncover and forefront the various forms of oppression that affect their lives as African American women. Since the late 1970s, African American art, as a form of self expression, explores issues which concern African peoples worldwide. During this time period, African American artists use symbols which represent the struggles, despair, hopes and dreams of a people striving to debunk prominent stereotypes and dismantle the intersecting oppressions of race, class and gender. Despite the long history of African American art, many black artists in contemporary society still have a difficult time getting their art viewed or accepted by the masses.
In the first image on the left, a man is kissing a lady; the artistic way of expression can be interrupted as disrespectful or offensive. Her work has had a lot of criticism as there is too much sexuality featured. For example, the boy and the girl on the cliff having oral sex. Nevertheless, she doesn’t shy away from controversial topics of racism, gender,and sexuality in her paper -cut silhouette.
The second exhibit entitled Painting with Fire: Works by Betsy Eby. I didn’t spend much time looking at these pieces. Although uniquely done, with heated colored beeswax, and inspired by music, all the artworks looked almost the same. I understand she was inspired by music, however, it looks as if she was listening to the same song on every piece. I wasn’t very impressed with this exhibit.
Many might have been working on Good Friday, but many others were enjoying The Frist Museum of Visual Arts. A museum visitor visited this exhibit on April 14, 2017 early in the morning. The time that was spent at the art museum was approximately two hours and a half. The first impression that one received was that this place was a place of peace and also a place to expand the viewer’s imagination to understand what artists were expressing to the viewers. The viewer was very interested in all the art that was seen ,but there is so much one can absorb. The lighting in the museum was very low and some of the lighting was by direction LED lights. The artwork was spaciously
Jackson, P. (1992). (in)Forming the Visual: (re)Presenting Women of African Descent. International Review of African American Art. 14 (3), 31-7.
She also uses the shadowing technique to make the figures look 3D, and to emphasize the foreground and background. She uses bright colors in the clothing and sunlight to brighten up the painting to make it known they are outside. She used a lot of detail in their clothing, and even on the table they are playing chess on. I also noticed on the side of the chess game, she engraved her name on the side, along with some other words I cant make out.
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Gill Perry’s writing “Women in Disguise: Likeness, The Grand Style and the Conventions of Feminine Portraiture in the Work of Sir Joshua Reynolds” deeply explores the construction and meaning behind the female portrait paintings done by Joshua Reynolds. Joshua Reynolds was a renowned portrait painter and Founder and President of the Royal Academy of Arts. His artistic life consisted much of full length portraits of many men, women, and children. His most significant work, however, was his portraits of women. Gill Perry analyzed his works and has come to the conclusion that the art created by Joshua Reynolds often aimed to be equal to literature, particularly in his feminine portraits. He created non conventional feminine portraits by means of disguise and distinguished ladies with looks of power, which is an unheard of means for feminine portraits of this age.
...e multiplicity of meaning embedded in these works suggests the importance of the body as a liminal site, a site of inscription and meaning making, in both historical-contemporary and more recent feminist work. It is, of course, unlikely that Antin or Kraus draws directly upon any singular theory explicated in this essay. Both artists are, however, undeniably interested in the formations, constructions, and shifts of subjectivity. Both Carving: A Traditional Sculpture and Aliens and Anorexia address the body’s uncontained boundaries, exploding the dual Cartesian model of interior/exterior self. As feminist artists, both Antin and Kraus are also surely aware of the complexity of discourses around food, self, and the body. Through the artists may not be speaking “to” or “through” any particular theoretical model, they are contributing to these discourses all the same.
One pleasant afternoon, my classmates and I decided to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to begin on our museum assignment in world literature class. According to Houston Museum of Fine Art’s staff, MFAH considers as one of the largest museums in the nation and it contains many variety forms of art with more than several thousand years of unique history. Also, I have never been in a museum in a very long time especially as big as MFAH, and my experience about the museum was unique and pleasant. Although I have observed many great types and forms of art in the museum, there were few that interested me the most.
The Madonna and Child, created by Cenni di Francesco di Ser Cenni between 1410 and 1415, is an iconographic painting of the Virgin Mary (left) and a chubby baby Jesus (right). The panel is painted with tempera and the halos around Mary’s and Jesus’s heads are made from goldleaf. La Toilette, painted by Richard Miller in 1910, is an Impressionist painting of a woman putting on her make up. He uses this subject to compare putting on makeup to applying oil paint on a canvas. In order to create the desired impact on the viewer of their paintings, Cenni and Miller use similar stylistic techniques to portray their female subjects.
There is a long history of gender roles in society. The expectations of gender roles continually shift; however, there is not a time when women and men share the same equalities simultaneously. The idea of how men and women should act is instilled in us at a young age. I think it starts really young with girls and boys being told what they can be and when they see what they are expected to be, they abandon parts of them which society deems as undesirable. We don’t acknowledge how much pressure we put on men and women to conform to the ideas of gender roles but it is apparent in our media and in the history of our art. One of the most influential things about figurative art is that it has the ability to capture society’s concepts of how men and women are expected to be during that time period. One thing for certain about gender equality is that it has historically and predominantly been a women’s movement. This sculpture, entitled Portrait Bust of a Woman with a Scroll, stood out to me in particular. It is is made of pentelic marble and dates back to the early 5th century. The sculpture shows a woman with a restless face, clothed in a mantle and head piece while holding a scroll. This sculpture reflects the women’s intelligence and capabilities being overshadowed by her gender and
Pornography and feminism have had quite an odd relationship. Feminist writers such as Gloria Steinem have denounced the sex industry while it has continued to expand exponentially. Due to technological advances such as the internet and cell phones, pornography is easier to access then ever before. Some publications even estimate that gross annual sales for pornographic videos would exceed four billion dollars (Rich 2011: 1). With this much money being invested into an industry that operates in a capitalistic society, it would be ignorant to hope that it would cease to exist. The truth is that pornography is not going anywhere. The issue that feminists from many different strains are debating is if porn is detrimental to women. And if so, how truly immoral is it? In this paper there will be an examination of how the two different radical-feminist theories have dealt with pornography while also discussing why the issue of pornography can be seen as such a confusing topic for feminists as a whole.
Another is the interesting set of images if found if the observer flips the painting over. Here in the left half of the painting there are two images, one of a puppet and an observer kneeling to view the show.