Anu Sidu
My theme for my IB art portfolio was the identities of American women. I feel as these five artworks represent my best work through a wide variety of mediums and compositions. This was just the title I wanted to give my portfolio but I explored different experiences that women in America experience. I wanted to focus on more universal struggles of women in America such as experiences with oversexualization, sensationalization of violence against women in the media, cultural attitudes aboout women’s sexuality, the shame many women carry with sex and the isolation that comes with it. I mainly focused on American culture because it was what I had the most experience with. But when talking about the American experience I was trying to portray experiences that would apply with every culture. In some works I tried to make the woman who the subject of the work more ethnically ambiguous in order to make the subject whoever the viewer wanted them to be. My theme was developed from my works by different portrayals of experiences that women in the United States go through. The beginning work demonstrates someone exploring their sexality. The next work had a similar message . The third work was a woman expressing outward anger towards societal attitudes about female sexuality. The fourth demonstrated the isolation women feel in terms of expressing how they feel and the different societal expectations placed upon them. The fifth work was an homage to Valerie Solanas who was a famous feminist extremist.The final work demonstrates acceptance and assimilation to societal norms. A final surrender of a person's personality to society. I would like the audience of this work to be able to understand the experiences of women better. The pieces were just intended to express the experiences of women particularly in the United States in a way that wasn’t violent or shocking to an audience. I felt that pieces that were too gory would shock an audience and be more exploitative than helpful. The audience should be able to understand the pieces and maybe resonate with them but the pieces were more for viewing than invoking powerful understanding from an audience viewing them. Some works would be easier to understand in the context of the portfolio and if they were separated from the portfolio it would be hard to decipher their meaning. So the main takeaway that I would like an audience to have from this body of work is a better understanding of the experiences of women.
Coming of Age
Watercolor and Acrylic
18 cm x 25 cm
The theme of this piece was coming of age. I wanted to display female sexuality without being explicit. I was inspired by a collection of photographs from Petra Collins. I utilized both acrylic paint and watercolor to create texture and shine to make the work look wet. The color palette of warm toned colors, mainly the red and orange tones, was meant to create a sense of warmth and excitement in the work.
Flowers
Acrylic on Air Dry Clay
4.75 cm ✕ 4.75 cm ✕ 29 cm
This artwork is a clay bouquet. It is covered in bright orange polka dots in order to create a contrast with its dark blue base. The bouquet was inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s work and is meant to portray how subjective the world can be. The work is meant to portray the specific subjectivity of femininity. The color scheme was selected in order to be attention grabbing and the vase was supposed to look odd and dull juxtaposed with the bright, saturated colors of the flowers.
Female Rage
Colored Pencil
18 cm x 25 cm
The theme of this work is female rage. I wanted to show how the power imbalance in a patriarchal society between men and women manifests itself as violence against women and how many people are frustrated with patriarchal societal occurences. The newspapers in the background represent the ever present reminder in the media of the treatment of women in society. The woman that is the subject of the work has skin that is colored to be reminiscent of fire to show her burning rage.
Patterns
Watercolor on Paper
23.5 cm x 30 cm
My theme for this piece was isolation. It was an extension of my piece titled Female Rage and tells the end of that piece. It is meant to demonstrate the isolation women in particular feel when facing patriarchal standards and the grips of modern rape culture. The moons in the background, symbolizing the menstrual cycle, demonstrate how many women are only considered women due to their sex and how many feel that their womanhood is connected to sex.
Portrait of Valerie
Acrylic on Canvas
20.32 cm ✕ 25.4 cm
My theme in this piece is sexism in the art world. I did a portrait of Valerie Solanas in the upside down portrait style of Georg Baselitz. In an interview Baselitz commented that “Women can’t paint, it's just a fact” which reminded me of Solanas, a radical feminist, who wrote that “A ‘male artist’ is a contradiction in terms. A degenerate can only produce degenerate art'” which inspired me to create a piece that combined both of them in order to make a commentary on the sexist views of men.
Making Faces
Colored Pencil
18 cm x 25 cm
For this piece my theme was the media and women’s internalized male gaze. I wanted to create a movie poster to demonstrate the opposite of something heavily influenced by men. However I wanted to comment on how inescapable the male gaze is through the title “Making Faces” which is the name of a well known book about makeup to demonstrate how no matter how hard you try to refuse it there is no way of knowing if you are free of the male gaze.
