Katherine Sherwood
Rear
Mixed media on found cotton duck.
81” x 101”. 2020.
Website: http://www.katherinesherwood.com/
California, USA
VO by Mari Weiss
Mixed media on found cotton duck.
81” x 101”. 2020.
Website: http://www.katherinesherwood.com/
California, USA
VO by Mari Weiss
ABOUT THE ARTWORK:
Venuses of the Yelling Clinic is a series of large-scale paintings featuring disabled reclining female nudes that reference medical imagery and disability. They appropriate art-historical images of the female nude in order to challenge canonical ideals of beauty. They are painted on the cotton backs of art history reproductions made in the 1950s and 1960s. The images on the reproduction prints are primarily Western paintings and drawings. The cotton backs are quite beautiful. They have handwritten labels with the artists’ names and catalogue numbers, a bit yellowed, and show evidence of repeated use. The reproductions are tiled together with linen strips to create a large, quilted, painting surface.
Rear in various ways speaks about disability. The painting reclaims the objectified female body and forces the viewer to acknowledge her presence. Her face is replaced with multiple images of my own brain from a recent fMRI, and is crowned with a halo-like tiara of 17th-21st century neuro-anatomical illustrations. She has beautiful brown skin, very unlike Francois Boucher’s sickly, pallid version. She has a prosthetic leg. The drapery in Rear in the original image has been replaced with bold, colorful, repeated patterns, removing the reference to the “unveiling” in the male-centric, erotic objectification of the female body. My intention was to make these women regal, captivating, thick and generous.
Rear in various ways speaks about disability. The painting reclaims the objectified female body and forces the viewer to acknowledge her presence. Her face is replaced with multiple images of my own brain from a recent fMRI, and is crowned with a halo-like tiara of 17th-21st century neuro-anatomical illustrations. She has beautiful brown skin, very unlike Francois Boucher’s sickly, pallid version. She has a prosthetic leg. The drapery in Rear in the original image has been replaced with bold, colorful, repeated patterns, removing the reference to the “unveiling” in the male-centric, erotic objectification of the female body. My intention was to make these women regal, captivating, thick and generous.
DESCRIPTION:
A nude brown skinned woman lies on her stomach, facing left. She looks over her shoulder at us. Her face is gold with greenish brown circles around her eyes and on her nose and mouth. Her hair is curly brown with a patch that is pink and another that is yellow. A crumpled white nightdress covers her left arm and parts of her back. She lies on a quilt of alternating blue and black squares within squares. Her bare right foot is visible, as is her left, which has a black and dark red prosthetic leg with a white foot. By the head of the bed is a tray with a gray and gold covered dish beside a round jewelry box. Pearls hang from the box. The background is made of rectangular panels of canvas with numbers and names written in each corner: Renoir, Picasso, Raeburn, Canaletto, and Romney.
-description by Teri Grossman
-description by Teri Grossman
Opulent Mobility by A. Laura Brody is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
The Opulent Mobility license refers to the exhibit and its audio descriptions. Individual artworks are the property of the individual artists.