ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m a child of the conservative midwest, cornfed a steady diet of late 90’s/early 00’s sexism. My work thus far has been a razor-sharp reflection on growing up in this environment; too loud to be the chill girl and too dorky to be Grrl Power. My work lives somewhere between theater and performance art, using collaborations with designers, musicians, magicians, and filmmakers to playfully make itself at home across a diverse spectrum of venues. I’m inspired by ghosts, the “free” section on Craig’s List, and what happens inside of our bodies and minds as we die. I craft multimedia performances that weave together original music, standup, storytelling, video, collage, and slideshow around feminist themes to create evening-length works that encourage audiences to embrace the community forged through the acknowledgment of past embarrassments and trauma. For me, healing is found in poking fun at trauma; it is my honor to offer up my own experiences as fodder for comedy.
My collage work is an extension of my performance practice, using found paper ephemera, personal journals, and self-portraits to create richly layered pop art reflections on rape, expectations associated with being socialized as a female, self-objectification, and coming of age in the “boys club” environment of the early millennium. Inspired by the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Genevive Gaignard, and Barbara Kruger, I’m interested in juxtaposing seemingly antiquated objects, images, and text with ephemera from my modern life, showing how hard (often impossible) it is to escape old stereotypes of femininity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Maggie Kubley was born in Indiana, grew up in Indiana, and received her BA in Theatre from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana before moving to Chicago in 2006. She participates in the theatre world as a multimedia performance artist and in the art world as a collage artist. Her performance practice weaves works of original video, music, and comedy around feminist themes to create evening-length performances. Kubley’s collage does much of the same, using found paper ephemera, personal journals and self portraits to create razor-sharp reflections on the midwestern female experience.
© Maggie Kubley