Thanks to mass media, pornography is easily accessible and raunch culture is everywhere, leading me to question the perceived hyper-sexuality of women (and men) in pornography. In a desire to determine something relevant in today’s material culture and consumer society, I explore pornography through painting. For me, painting and pornography go hand in hand, especially since both appeal directly to the senses offering the viewer sheer visual pleasure. Confused about my own feelings on smut, I suspect pornography, similar to ancient erotic art, documents, as well as perpetuates, certain myths and truths surrounding issues of sexuality, gender, and power through depictions of love-making.
My paintings are very process oriented. I cut out images from pornography magazines and collage them onto stretched canvas to create intricate compositions of intertwined bodies. Then, layer by layer, I paint over the collage, focusing on the shapes of the bodies and deleting the majority of details, such as backgrounds and accessories. Using pornography as a ground for my painting allows me to directly appropriate the material into my painting. In the act of choosing certain images and not others, I am acting like a consumer of pornography would – I keep what I like and throw out the rest. Even though pornography is the starting point for me, my paintings are not really pornographic but highly sexualized compositions using sticky sweet colours to evoke the viewers own memories of a recent romp. My finished paintings tend to be neither representational nor abstract, but the flesh and candy colour palette used to morph the collaged bodies together into an orgy of sex and bod
y parts hints at a rather naughty narrative.
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