Culture, Identity & the Visual Arts: Who Am I? [ page 6 ]

The stunted or incomplete physicality of the displayed bodies functions as a metaphor for the unrealized or stunted psyche. Arrested and malformed physical development mimics an arrested and malformed development of self and identity. In the tradition of turn-of-the-century postmortem studio photographs, these portraits of the dead reflect my desire to acknowledge and memorialize the suffering of those who are most powerless in our culture. Through the process of drawing, I enact what I perceive to be lacking in the lives of so many wounded children – a soft and delicate stroke, prolonged patience in encouraging the face to reveal itself, and a gentle coaxing of form into being. It is a symbolic act of nurturing, breathing a kind of life and beauty into these blind and mute faces.

One only has to look around, perhaps no further than your own childhood, to see the often-negative impact of parenting on childhood development, and parenting (whether destructive or constructive) represents our most profound and influential experience of self-definition. This is not to suggest that all parents scar their children, or that the right to have children should somehow be legislated. But certainly what is currently viewed as a right would be better viewed as a privilege, a privilege from which many should be discouraged. Our wounded and scarred children, often the product of damaged and wounded parents, become our damaged and wounded adults. The wounded self is passed from one generation to the next in a seemingly endless cycle of dysfunction and identity malformation. Our dysfunctional homes become our dysfunctional organizations become our dysfunctional nations, and the cycle repeats itself. The microcosm becomes the macrocosm.

As an artist, I consciously engage in this rather harsh and disparaging view of American culture. And in doing so, I acknowledge that I cannot exclude myself entirely from this critique as I slip back and forth between a cultural position of privilege to a cultural position of exclusion. I am Caucasian in a culture that privileges “whiteness”. I am middle-class. I am a homeowner. I am well educated. But I also bring to my observations an awareness of my own “otherness”. I am a single, middle-aged, childless woman, and I am a lesbian. My sexuality, perceived by my detractors as the very essence of my being, is under chronic and sanctioned attack by powerful patriarchal, political, and religious institutions. I am often denied the provisional/conditional respect and affirmation that western culture reserves for women who are either positioned in relation to a man (as a wife) or positioned in relation to children (as a mother).

In her 1998 book “Feminist Thought,” Rosemarie Tong rephrases in postmodern terms Simone de Beauvoir’s essential question of feminist theory, “Why is woman the other?”

“ Postmodern feminists take de Beauvoir’s understanding of otherness and turn it on its head. Woman is still the other, but rather than interpreting this condition as something to be transcended, postmodern feminists proclaim its advantages. The condition of otherness enables women to stand back and criticize the norms, values, and practices that the dominant patriarchal culture seeks to impose on everyone, including those who live on its periphery…Thus, otherness, for all of its associations with oppression and inferiority, is much more than an oppressed, inferior condition. It is also a way of being, thinking, and speaking that allows for openness, plurality, diversity, and difference…It is enormously appealing to be an outsider – to be uncorrupted by the system, to see and feel what other people do not see and feel, to be free of tight constraints and unnecessary restrictions. But it is equally appealing to be an insider – to be a valued member of the team, to share a common vision, to have, as Aristotle said, ‘partners in virtue and friends in action.’”