katarinacyrene

This is amazing!

(via republicoflabia-deactivated2012)

This is pretty amazing. This is why I’m an artist/ sculptor.

digbicks:

Non-sign II is an installation by seattle based art collective Lead Pencil Studio located at the Canada-US border near Vancouver. The sculpture is made from small stainless steel rods that are assembled together to create the negative space of a billboard. While most billboards draw attention away from the landscape, Non-sign II frames the landscape, focusing attention back on it.

This was a fun project I did in exploring semiotics and paradox. I’m not going to post a lengthy statement. The title is being re-worked but I’m thinking Lips.

 Innies, Outies and Inbetweenies: How Gender is Informed by Sex

      In distinguishing sex from gender it is important to clarify that ‘sex’ refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define an individual, and ‘gender’ refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for people. Therefore, in considering sex—male, female, or other—we automatically associate gender—masculinity, femininity, and however we perceive otherness to be—with it.

      Judith Butler argues this very point that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which, in turn, is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is commonly regarded as a kind of continuum. Butler’s approach is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not ‘caused’ by other stable factors. She suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold, and calls for subversive action in the present: ‘gender trouble’ – the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders, and therefore identities.

      Butler seeks to disrupt a model of sexual difference that sees sex as a natural bedrock that is then overlaid by cultural construction—“gender.” In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that accepting the sex/gender distinction obscures important questions: “[c]an we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway?”(6). Butler thus bids us to inquire into the means by which sex becomes naturalized as ontology, undertaking a genealogical inquiry into ontology (5). She challenges the distinction between an unconstructed natural sex and a culturally constructed gender, emphasizing instead the utter construction of both conceptions (that is, of both sex and gender). Butler argues that sex comes to have the appearance of ontological truth only as an effect of the workings of discourse and culture (Gender Trouble 7).

     In this work, I have cast a series of belly-buttons— outies, innies, and what I call inbetweenies—and have categorized and labeled them according to sex as well as provided options for gender identification. Here sex is defined according to physiology, that being that the innie represents the female sex, the outy represents the male sex, and the inbetweenie represents otherness. My intention through these definitions is to make the viewer question whether or not they agree that certain gender roles are expected to be fulfilled based on a person’s biological makeup and whether or not masculinity is presumed of males, femininity is presumed of females etc.. If not, then where lies the discrepancy? And if one believes that femininity is performative behaviour that can be assigned to a male or that masculinity is performative behaviour that can be assigned to a female, then how can we rationalize expectations of gender as informed by sex? Can we? Do we? However, it is absurd in the first place that physiology determines sex because in doing so we are presuming that physiology determines gender due to the fact that the two are inherently simultaneously associated, thus it can be argued that physiology informs gender performativity in that certain behavioural characteristics are expected to be performed by an individual based on their physical appearance.

      Having said this, my work is highlighting the ways in which the expectations of gender performativity as informed by sex are misrepresentational of individual identity. What if our children were raised to believe that the characteristics of their belly-buttons informed their identity much less their gender? That would be absurd! Nevertheless, children are taught that if one has a penis- that makes them a boy, or if one has a vagina- that makes them a girl, and thus certain behaviours, activities, and attributes are expected of them that society considers appropriate for their sex.

   It is my belief—to quote Judith Butler— that, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender… identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”. As an artist, my interest lies in the ways in which we perform particularly in the ways in which we perform gender. As such my inclination to create objects tends to dwell within the realm of performativity. That is, I make objects that are to be performed.

   My latest work Rawhide Casts are a prime example of the discourse I intend to engage my audience in. This particular work was not only made to be theoretically performed but also to be part of a larger discourse around performance and performativity. A fourth year INTM student Abby Lambert commissioned these pieces from me —based on past work of mine that she had seen— to be used in her thesis video dealing with issues of gender and gender performativity.

   The material I used was inspired by the work of Janine Antoni entitled Saddle where she used rawhide to cast a silhouette of her body. The underlying messages of intimacy and empathy in her work were/are inspiring to me in that I myself seek to achieve some intimate level of understanding from the audience with regards to the issues I deal with in my work.

   Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. November 15, 1989.

ULTIMATE BIRTHDAY CAKE! …I’d be okay with this.

(via rimaneverland)