Mismatched Expectations
Collage inspired by works by Viola Frey and Squeak Carnwath from Napa’s Di Rosa Center for the Arts’ collection
I am fortunate to be enrolled in a three part art making opportunity at the Di Rosa Center for Art in Napa. Our first visit, we viewed works by Viola Frey and Squeak Carnwath, none of which I had seen before. Mismatched Expectations is a mashup of inspirations from five works we saw there. Here are the results.
I took Carnwath’s Subject Object as my theme. The outline of a demure nude is copied onto black paper and then sliced in the manner of Frey’s large ceramic pieces. I expanded the idea to include the expectations put on young women: to be pretty, available, and to procreate without losing attractiveness.
A cheesy calendar photo, framed by a crown cut from a photo of the sun, looks saucily out at the viewer from atop the nude’s body. She is inspired by the old-fashioned porcelain busts in Frey’s work. The orange echoes the bold palette of Frey’s huge ceramic man and other works we viewed by the two artists. I also used sun cutouts as triangles echoing the woman’s stylized genital area, covered by a palm frond in Carnwath’s composition.
There are no men in my work, eliminating the male gaze. But there is a grotesque groping hand, in the style of both artists, hinting at male menace.
The demure nude is in contrast to the naked woman (freed from a 1950s photo journal and therefore previously very much objectified) striding into the frame. She owns her body, and is arguably the main figure–subject–of my composition.
A teaparty of young women gussied up in Victorian clothing are right where certain men think women ought to be, pretty and angling for marriage to eligible males. One has alighted to the top, think Jane Austen.
There are children, little girls doing little girl things, occupying spaces in the woman’s body, the womb, the breasts, and the head. The source is Viola Frey’s piece, which includes various ceramic figures, including children.
The frame is a nod to Frey’s maquette, while the cup echoes Carnwath’s pillar.
Roses: How to win a woman’s heart? Pretty yet thorny? White roses for purity, red for blood. Reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, Painting the Roses Red, an act of fraught transformation. I choose to take this as women transforming from Object to Subject.
Finally, a photo of a doorway looking out on the waters caught my attention as an echo of the cut out in Frey’s assemblage. As a portal it might be a means of escape and tranquility, or does it have sinister overtones? It may also be seen as a figure in its own right.
Great collage! I hope you experiment with more of that in the future!