This week I have really been focusing on my research and what work really influence me and make me produce the work I do.
I stared of looking at some artist that has influenced me throughout this process. Firstly I have really been looking at the work of Hannah Wilke. In her work she often features herself as a posing glamour model. Her use of self in photography and performance art, however, has been interpreted as a celebration and validation of Self, Women, the Feminine, and Feminism. Conversely, it has also been described as an artistic deconstruction of cultural modes of female vanity, narcissism and beauty. Wilke referred to herself as a feminist artist from the beginning. I really like the way she use herself as a canvas and how she pushed herself to create these images even when she was on her death bed. She is a very inspirational woman.
The next artist I have been looking at is Frida Kahlo, she often painted herself and she always painted herself with big black eye brows and a slight moustache. She painted to occupy her time during her temporary immobilization. Her self-portraits were a dominant part of her life when she was immobile for three months after her accident. Kahlo once said, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best”. Critic wrote once about her that “It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.”
Also I have been revisiting some of my research previously on the artist Orlan. Her work is something that has always fascinated me, the way she use her body as a canvas and does these crazy live performance pieces of her having some kind of plastic surgery. I like this idea of face deformity and how she is reconstructing her own face. She was once asked was she trying make herself more beautiful? “No, my goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It’s all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it,” she says, proudly.
This is link to her talking about her work which I found very interesting.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2009/jul/01/orlan-artist-interview
