ARTIST STATEMENT
Who describes women? Who tells women’s stories? You don’t need me to tell you: it’s men, of course.
This piece is from a series I’ve been working on, one that attempts to reclaim and re-tell familiar women’s stories from a feminist perspective. The pieces in this series adopt famous women from mythology, history, and culture–Venus. Susanna. Medusa, Lucretia, Godiva, Mona Lisa, Miss America–and re-presents them, extricating when possible the sexist and cliched associations that accompany them. In many cases, I appropriate and alter images from famous artworks, usually alongside passages from related poems or essays, with a view to re-framing our understanding of these stories.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I am a screen printer, painter, and collage artist, living and working in New York City and Venice Beach, California. My work is predominantly in the pop vein, strongly influenced both by the pop artists of the 1960s and 70s, and by our own current visual culture. Much of my work engages political themes—especially gun violence, excessive consumerism, and the (unaccountably abandoned) feminist project—although some of it is not nearly so serious. BA, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; MA, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. My work is in the permanent collections of the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center, Detroit; and Eugene V. Debs Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana.
© Gigi Salij