I began this project with the assignment of appropriating the classic painting American Gothic by Grant Wood. When I first looked at the painting critically, I was immediately aware of the man and woman depicted, and of the gendered power dynamic they convey: the woman stands behind the man and looks to him as if for direction, while the man stands forward, looking directly at the viewer, and holds a sharp and exaggerated pitchfork. From further research, I learned that Iowans from the area Wood drew inspiration for the painting for rejected the work for representing small-town life as old-fashioned and repressed. For me, this disparity strengthened the painting’s visual representation of a stern patriarch wielding silent power over a repressed woman.
My first sketches centered around my idea of cutting out and rearranging the figures in the painting to visually tip the power dynamic in favor of the woman. I placed the pitchfork, a symbol that here represents masculinity and appears threatening, in the woman’s hand. I began to think about cutting up the image of the male figure as a way to represent the dissecting of masculinity.
In this sketch, I began to think about how to connect the man and woman in my collage as a way of commenting on their changed relationship dynamic. I sketched the woman actively using the pitchfork against the man to convey that, instead of the man controlling her as in the original painting, she protects herself against the man, who is outed as an oppressor rather than a protector.
This layout of collage pieces shows my design taking shape and expressing my concept. The image I chose to slice together with the image of the man’s face is one that I thought expressed dangerous masculinity that is threatening and angry. Rather than simply having the woman use her pitchfork to stab at or brandish the man, I made her use it to grab a slice of the “toxic” masculine face, so instead of merely protecting herself against the man, she is actively dismantling the construct of dangerous masculinity and patriarchy.
In this final collage, I made minor changes to the layering of the male faces to make the composition more dynamic as well as to convey the crumbling of masculinity and patriarchy at the hands of the woman. She wears a bold red color, representing a transition from repression to strength. I added a cutout of two hands pulling a chain across the slices of male face to balance the composition and further convey the rough but powerful break from patriarchal domination.
After critique, I made slight changes to my collage in photoshop to make the magazine cutouts of the male face look more clearly masculine. I considered using different analog materials in place of the male face that I had originally chosen, but I did not want to sacrifice the original image, which I thought very fitting in terms of color, shape, and expression. Instead, I warped the image to make the man’s jaw and lips more defined.
