Interpretation: "Changing"

Changing

Lisa Yuskavage, circa 2003

12 September 2012

By Lauren Painter

There is something about Lisa Yuskavage and her body of work. I was instantly captured by her depictions of the female form and body, as well as the color schemes she articulates in most of her controversial pieces. She has a brilliant grasp on color concepts and what palettes emphasize what and the mood she is trying to place upon her audience.

What caught my eye was Changing. Maybe it was the colors, or maybe it was the subtlety of the movement taking place in this particular moment Yuskavage chose to recreate on canvas. Perhaps it is a combination of both.

“When Yuskavage first began painting these hyper-sexualised women, she says she imagined a fictional male gaze.” –Skye Sherwin, The Guardian

Within all her works, Ms. Yuskavage is trying to present the female form to the audience the way women are seen as an entirety. Her paintings depict women with bloated stomachs, wide hips and larger-than-average breasts, blushing cheeks, button noses, and small lips. Their bodies are the primary focus, and then our attention transitions from the nude form to the petite faces, with flowing hair and innocent faces. Even the body postures are feminine and delicate; most of the women in these paintings are not looking directly at the viewer, but they are entranced in that specific moment with whatever they are partaking in, which makes the audience question what they are thinking about, or if they are thinking about anything at all. They are seductively welcoming and forcefully challenging all at the same time. These women seem to examine and portray society’s obsession with female sexuality.

Yuskavage might be attempting to make the audience uncomfortable, but she was not successful with me. In opposition, I loved her works and Changing may actually be one of my favorite new pieces of art. It captures the female form in a candid moment, and the curvature that is seen (apparently) from a male’s eye. The color scheme sets a calm, relaxed mood as well, and you cannot really make sense of what this woman is thinking, but I believe that is what the point is—it’s all visual.

Interpretation: "Stadia II"

Stadia II

Julie Mehretu, circa 2004

6 September 2012

By Lauren Painter

Reaction: I fell in love almost instantaneously with Stadia II by Julie Mehretu. I favor any kind of piece with vivid colors and a certain “flow” to it. The initial stylistic elements and curvy lines, and disorganized setup were captivating. The layering was also fantastic, and brought a nice blend of order and chaos at the same time.

Visual: Mehretu uses a computer to make drawings and manipulate material like architectural layouts, which are then depicted onto her canvases. Dashes, lines and swirls are exotically bright and vivid in the spacious canvas of Stadia II. The imagery she uses in her work refers to the environment she said she thinks of when she makes the symbolical marks. She states that the marks are, ''agents that have character and behave in certain ways, as though they're constructing or deconstructing societies.''

Context & Background: Mehretu was born in 1970 in Ethiopia and currently lives and works in New York. Her work is more abstract—but it isn’t as abstract as it may appear, because of the layers and its exploding style. As the audience becomes absorbed into the abundance of layers, it conveys a sense of order. “The layers start to separate themselves, but never so much that they can be viewed as purely distinct. One cannot analyze one layer without falling into another. The idea of stadium evokes the idea of people coming together, sometimes miraculously in a beautiful way or in a hard way and the flags reflect a coming together internationally or nationally.”

Interpretation: Stadia II commands a lot of depth, both spatially and architecturally. The canvas is seemingly complex through her ladylike interpretations of explosions, fire, and water in both two and three dimensions. With many layers of acrylic paint and marks made by pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint, her work delivers a compression of time, space and place.

Evaluation: Mehretu has remarked that she draws from the past and imagines the future. Her spaces capture the sense of our time in history. Her work focuses on systems, architecture, and space. Mehretu brings an animated visual language into the art world that deals with reality today as much as it deals with the biography of herself as an artist in modern day society.

Last Shot

Spring 2011 

By Lauren Painter

I never wanted this.

I am mindless;

taking orders from a murderer,

Angel of Death, I agreed,

but all beneath him called him Franz1.

The train greets Treblinka2 innocently;

they are dead already.

The sign lied “Baths” but gas can’t clean them.

Stuck in a chamber, helpless,

Zyklon-B3 fell to the floors and I made sure

the doors remained strong.

Killed like tiny ants,

they fought to live, banging against the walls.

Through the porthole, I saw pain, struggle,

no way out. We have much in common.

The hospital4 was no place for the weak

to heal, but to be shot,

everything disguised as something it was not.

Black clouds fell closely to the camp,

death suffocating the air.

Lost, stuck inside a prison,

surrounded by nothingness and death.

Guarding, I am lifeless,

just like them.

The thousands of faces populate my mind,

my index comfortably pulls the trigger,

gun pointing at my right temple.

It silently screamed in agony,

but I silently screamed in bliss.

This is my last shot.

1. Franz- SS Chief Commander Kurt Franz of Treblinka’s camp, known as the most cruelest and inhumane commander at Treblinka

2. Treblinka- Execution and concentration camp in Poland during the Holocaust

3. Zyklon-B- Pesticide used in gas chambers to kill a mass amount of prisoners

4. hospital- When weaker prisoners were unable to make it to the gas chambers to be killed, they were sent to another chamber cloaked as a hospital to be shot