NYAB Event - Susan Newmark "Cut & Color: The Janes"

Susan Newmark "Cut & Color: The Janes"

Figureworks

This event has ended.

CUT & COLOR is a series of mixed media collages and artists books based on the persona of Jane Russell, one of the first “bad girl” movie stars whose sensual omnipotent persona was a harbinger of today’s cult of celebrity. Jane’s image is appropriated from a vintage coloring/paper doll book made for little girls combined with icons from current fashion, film, tattoo and skin magazines. An early Barbie, she works, plays, travels, sails, dresses and socializes -- always alluring and always in total control. But, while Jane’s gaze conveys confidence and an assertive engagement with the world and is slightly illicit, in my work she is simultaneously struggling and unraveling, losing body parts, morphing and fragmenting or disappearing entirely into herself. It is these very human states of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and obsessiveness that interests me in exploring the disparate clash of public message and personal reality. My working process of cutting, tearing, layering, sanding and layering again with drawing and color, parallels my fascination with simultaneous levels of meaning as I explore my own emotional identity,and reflect upon the many contradictions of being female. This additive process with its cumulative layering of paper, drawing, images and color creates a dense web of vision that incorporates accident and improvisation. My unique artists books, whose structures are altered children’s cardboard books, add glitzy decorative objects to collage ,and reflect upon Jane’s various body parts and their need for adornments along with simple directives for the voyage through life.

Media

• Drawing
• Other

ADVERTISE ON NYAB