ARTIST STATEMENT
Because few feminist art spaces exist in Chicago, Woman Made Gallery has become a safe space for me to address issues related to our self perceptions, and other personal topics like the environment and social injustice. This is one of a series, titled Conformity Repackaged which illustrates how generations of women can conform their behavior to prevailing social conventions based on peer influences, a need to be loved, body image, and the pressure to please.
In my own family, I witnessed how insecurities and social practices have been passed down from one generation to the next, and chose to explore these in this work. Advertising messages continue to make billions for corporations who manipulate these weaknesses. Here, a (re)packaged product speaks back to a consumer’s vulnerabilities.
One Clip: Sexually active young women are pressured to remove all traces of body hair, so as to appear sexier. The painful procedure of Brazilian waxing allows women to be completely hairless for longer periods of time. Some women will even re-stitch their vaginas to give the illusion (and feeling) that they are still virgins. Does the pressure to please go too far? Let us remind ourselves that conformity is our choice.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cynthia Kerby is a visual artist, former design professor, jewelry designer, curator, and co-founder of True Ideas, a design studio in Evanston, Illinois. Her visual art has been included in ArtPrize, and shown at the Evanston Art Center and Noyes Cultural Arts Center, at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, at White Bear Center for the Arts in Minnesota and in the Valade Family Gallery at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, in Detroit, to name a few. She has curated exhibitions at The Westchester Children’s Museum in New York and at Space 900 in Evanston. Cynthia’s conceptual Coronavirus mask was included in the Port Townsend Wearable Art Exhibition. She was a featured artist in (Re) An Ideas Journal in New York and also a recipient of a Ragdale Foundation Artist Residency in Lake Forest, Illinois. Cynthia earned her MFA in Visual Communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
As a visual artist, she shows familiar objects in unfamiliar ways and makes observations of life’s frailties or uncertainties through a lens of personal awareness and curiosity. Her focus is to create work that facilitates change in human behavior and the role she plays in promoting public awareness towards action.
© Cynthia Kerby