Consuming Bodies Series

Television pretends to reflect our realities as if it were a mirror; however, it does not give us a pure reflection.  We are shown things from elsewhere only in an already established, prepared, ready-made version: there is no place for our own judgment—we are unable to resist simply accepting, as reality, the images placed before us.  From television we learn who we are, how we should dress, how we should act, what we should look like, what is sexy and what is not, who has power and who does not, what is of value and what is not, what is right and what is not.

In this series, Consuming Bodies, I explore issues of body image using appropriated images form old master paintings and advertisements from fashion companies such as Victoria Secret, Prada, Gucci, and Calvin Klein.  As a whole, our culture is consumed by the way our bodies look, and it is the images on television that we measure ourselves with, and try to emulate.

These paintings are fragmented and layered with multiple images and various painting styles in order to symbolize fragmentation and the way we process images and construct reality.   In societies inundated with information technology (television, phones, internet, etc.), we are bombarded in our daily lives by images and information; therefore, innumerable fragments of information that do not really belong together compete for our attention.  Compositionally these paintings are constructed to reflect this concept of fragmentation. I will also use a strategy of combining various styles of painting (that normally do not belong together) to further symbolize fragmentation and the way that we process images and construct reality.  These styles will include: classical figure renderings, graffiti, hardedge, and abstract expressionist visual strategies within the same painting.