ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice is in response to issues of performative gender such as the beauty burden, politeness conditioning, emotional labor, and gender-based sexual-violence. Within these themes, I investigate the push-and-pull between desire/disgust, and my own feelings of being unsafe in my body, in both public and private spheres. I exploit the juxtaposition of oral and vaginal labia to ask questions of myself and my audience in relation to cultural paradigms of shame. In my SLIT series, I ask: Why are you unbothered by the public SLIT on my face, but shame me for the private SLIT between my legs? SLIT uses illusion and the unexpected to subvert clichés through a critical examination of the daily performances of gender in which we all participate. The butterfly has been used as a symbol of the feminine for centuries, given its resemblance to the shape of the vulva, its beauty, and its apparent vulnerability. In my work, I examine ways to subvert these predictable associations with the feminine, and genitalia assigned female at birth. The human project of beauty is a burden that falls disproportionately on people socialized to be women and girls. (La)bi[a]diversity exposes the necessity to perform beauty as a survival tactic and its intimate ties to gender-based sexual violence. I transgress cultural paradigms of body shame to create imagery proving, based on my research, that there is no such thing as a “normal” labial structure. My paintings and drawings create radical visibility in my quest to de-stigmatize labial anatomical variations.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jessica Du Preez was born in Summit, New Jersey, and raised in Orlando, Florida from the age of 7. She received her BFA in 2013 with dual degrees in Fine Art and Art History from Florida Southern College and her MFA in Painting and Drawing in 2021 from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her practice explores themes such as healing from body shame, performing beauty as a survival mechanism, and gender based sexual violence in both the public and private spheres. In her most recent work, Du Preez is investigating the semiotics of lips and butterflies as a way to subvert gendered clichés and critically examine performative gender. Du Preez lives and works in Chicago, IL. She has exhibited at various institutional, private, and public venues, including the Melvin Art Gallery in Lakeland, FL; the Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL; SNEHTA in Athens, Greece; and has shown in Chicago, IL with: Terrain Exhibitions, the MacLean Center, the Hairpin Arts Center, the Research House for Asian Art, Patient Info and Woman Made Gallery.
© Jessica Du Preez