Artist’s Statement
Microaggressions are the everyday verbal and nonverbal actions and words that are used to target an individual or group of people whether it be intentional or unintentional. Microaggressions can target people(s) due to race, gender, sexuality, religion, and etc. For my piece, I wanted to focus on the mainstream fashion culture microaggressions that I have experienced against my gender and my body. Nowadays, we don’t see a lot of “muscular” women in popular culture, and for some reason, we find women who display much heavier and muscular bodies to be shocking. What attributes to this is the rational fear of women looking physically strong is society’s goal to discourage women from reaching their full potential and even the possibility of surpassing men in that respect. Muscles or even a toned body is “socially” associated with masculinity and a males body, so that’s why it is hard for people to accept women with such body types. But the reality is, all women are not the same and we all have different body types. Having a “stronger” looking more muscular body should not mean you are not a woman. I wanted to portray this idea in my piece and since we were asked to engage in using found objects to illustrate our ideas, I decided upon using mechanical parts to construct my piece. I thought the mechanical parts added to this idea of “the male construct” and tools/mechanical parts are typically associated with activities that males would engage in. Not to mention the rigidity and rust of the parts portrayed my message perfectly!
The hardest part for me was choosing a conceptual idea to portray my microaggression. I’m not used to doing abstract art, so this project was definitely a challenge for me. When I pitched my first idea, I was having problems with portraying my message too literally and making it so complex. I actually came up with about four or five ideas before coming up with my final idea that I carried out in this project. Two things I kept in mind: simplicity and letting the objects speak for themselves (in this case, for the microaggression I was trying to portray). My final idea was using the mechanical parts, which included screws, washers, nuts, and bolts to create the form of a woman’s body. During the process, I was not trying to make any particular shape, I just went with the shape of the parts to tell my message through the parts themselves, but still kept it simple. Working with these parts was definitely not easy, I came across many challenges of trying to keep them held together. I used hot glue, but sometimes it was not the best for the heavier parts, so I used super glue. I liked working with the different mechanical parts because they were all really versatile in shape and size, which allowed me to be really flexible in making the form of the woman’s body. Something that was interesting was that for a lot of the parts, I didn’t have to glue them together, instead, I screwed them together and they held a lot better.
Overall, I’m very proud of the end result of my piece. I didn’t think I would even be able to create something as remotely close to what I produced and I’m just happy to be able to spread a positive message about mainstream microaggressions and women’s bodies. I think my piece is also ambiguous in the fact that you can’t really tell if it’s a man or a woman, and that’s the point of it. At first glance, you can’t really tell the exact gender of the figure. Because we shouldn’t judge people’s gender based on their body types or looks. There is no set standard for what a woman should look like and my project is clear to that message. What’s interesting is that if someone were to look at this, they might just assume it’s a male because it’s made of tools. Until they find out that I went into this project with the intention of making it a female. If I was to do this project again, I would definitely attempt to make it on a larger scale. What I want everyone to take out of this piece is to realize that everyone is different and nobody is the same in terms of looks or body type, and we have to accept that.
Citations:
Rosdahl, Jamilla. “Why Do We Find Muscular Women Wildly Perplexing?” The Conversation. March 13, 2019. Accessed March 14, 2019. http://theconversation.com/why-do-we-find-muscular-women-wildly-perplexing-21846.
