ARTISTS STATEMENT
My work on this subject inevitably underscores a tension—between our society’s avowed admiration, even reverence, for motherhood, and our routine contempt for the day-to-day work of mothers, and our quickness to criticize them; between the stifling definition of motherhood embodied in our popular culture, and the very sloppy reality of mothering; and between the perfectly natural longing to be a mother, and the perfectly understandable resistance to the constrictions of a mother’s life.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gigi Salij is a collage artist, screenprinter, and watercolorist, living and working in Los Angeles and New York. Her work employs pop-culture imagery to engage issues of social justice: gun violence, immigrant rights, and above all the (unaccountably abandoned) feminist project. She has a BA in political science from Swarthmore College, and a MArch from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She has taught at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
© Gigi Salij