ARTIST STATEMENT
All of my work deals with the abuse of power by patriarchy. Too many people’s stories of sexual trauma begin well before puberty. Bodies that are read as female are quickly turned into objects meant for consumption. The majority of my work currently takes this sexual object-ness to the point of absurdity. They are grotesque femme-fatales, monsters without agency, existing to be acted upon. This of course is a lie of patriarchy and sexual abusers, women/femme people do have agency.
But the violation of rape is a most violent rebuke of that agency. These beings though exist as an extreme and absurd depiction of what it often feels like to live in the setting of a sexual trauma. They are victims. Victim is seen as a dirty word, a sign of weakness. Weakness is part of how victimhood comes to be, but it is weakness born of the violator, not the violated.
These creatures are vulnerable, and covered in sensitive and naked nerve endings. That is what it feels like, for years, to live in a traumatized body. This aspect of the #metoo movement/conversation has sadly been overlooked. The effects of trauma are things that society does not understand, and that many survivors need years to understand. I hope that the absurd nature of these allows people a more tangible way to begin to understand trauma, and thus begin to heal.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
L Ande Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and painter in Boston working with the contextual phenomenology of color and the absurdity of the gaze.
© L Ande Smith