28th January – 12th February, 2016
Lauren McCartney
Movement for Action
I paint still lifes. Models frighten me. The sluts are always watching to catch you off your guard. You’ve got to be on the defensive all the time and the motif vanishes.
-Cézanne, on the difficulties of being an artist [1]
McCartney’s work explores the historical domination of women’s bodies, and the patriarchal signs placed on them, by situating painterly acts on her body. Accordingly, her body offers a counter-narrative that opposes the use of the female body in modernism, in which the female body has been traditionally owned and controlled by a conventionally male artist who gains his authenticity and autonomy by way of the masculine discourse of art-history. By producing corporeal works that engage the female body, McCartney offers a point of difference that better situates the patriarchal structures that dominate the West, thereby opening up the possibility of encountering the implications of feminine action painting.
[1] Shapiro, Meyer 1978. “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-Life.” In Modern Art- 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, 30. New York: Georges Braziller.