NYAB Event - Anna Gensler “Tinderella”

Anna Gensler “Tinderella”

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Anna Gensler’s process is perhaps best described in her own words:
How to objectify men who objectify women in 3 easy steps:
1. Man sends crude opening line via Tinder.
2. Draw him naked.
3. Send portrait to lucky man and enjoy results.

When Anna got tired of receiving obscene and sleazy messages on her profile on an internet dating website, the young artist decided to retaliate the best way she knew how: by drawing the men.

Based on their profile pictures, Anna portrayed them as naked, fat, and not very well endowed. She then sent her portraits back to the men – as well as posting them on Instagram. Anna, aka Instagranniepants was an instant success on Instagram and soon had close to 35.000 followers. Her revenge: objectifying the men who objectified her − in public.

With this deliberately simple process, Instagranniepants begins with two complex, contradictory phenomena brought about by digital communication − anonymity, and instant celebrity − and mercilessly combines the two into a single body of work.
Both literally and figuratively a caricature of the seemingly endless disappointment of online dating, Anna’s deceptively simple experiment pokes at the nature of this disappointment, alluding to and testing a host of prescient social, moral, and gender issues:
Do people, even creepy people, have an expectation of privacy online?
Does anonymity reveal the true nature of male behavior? Or are these men outliers?
Why are their rude comments transformed into comedy once we change the context?
Would they appreciate the absurdity of their own comments walking through Anna’s exhibit as unrelated observers?

Anna’s Instagranniepants provides us with a clever, and often hilarious medium through which we can explore and consider these perennial questions in a completely novel context.