As a painter and image collector, I work with historic figures and symbols of the feminine juxtaposed with my own obsession with self-images of the feminine that are so prevalent in contemporary media. My bulk of my collection is taken from the online source of Thinspiration – a weight loss blog of ‘before and after’ images of women who have lost weight. They are driven by a motivation toward an ideal of thinness as a form of behavior control and the obsession to ‘see’ these images in communicating these expectations, particularly within the Internet culture. In selecting the most visually powerful images, I find inspiration for my paintings and drawings. In particular, I seek images that represent the common visual distortion of the embodied space, and consequently, the distortion of a sense of the embodied self. These images attempt to elevate the abject self through a critical gaze at the highly mediated images of discrete body zones of imperfection – outsized torsos, thighs, breasts -- to reify those imperfections as a “potentially perfect” body forms, if one can just lose the weight. My work represents the grotesque, through an uncanny combination of the imaginary visual pleasure of the imperfect body part with the abject self. This simple ‘constructed’ feminine identity is a contrast to the dangerous conformity of mediated ideal body images represented on Thinspiration. Join the Facebook Event. Categories All Student Profile