Outcome 2

1 finished painting / artwork that is an expansion upon issues researched, discovered, experimented with, and finished from Painting Outcome 1. This painting is to be a minimum of 1m x 1m in size. Again you need to have a conceptual premise and this premise must be able to be identifiable within the works. You must be able to answer the below questions using different research and individuals to those first researched in Painting Outcome 1.

Also, to accompany this painting you need to write a 250-word artist statement (3 paragraphs/1 page max) that answers the following questions. By answering these it will give you a frame to express your ideas in the statement. This statement will be used in the Graduart catalogue at the end of the year.

My Face Hits the Side of Your Gaze

Artist Statement for Assessment:

“This painting is the centrepiece of a body of work exploring the queer experience through the medium of portraits comprising three outcomes. The first outcome examines phantasms, a philosophical term for a particular way of misinterpreting reality by projecting your feelings onto it. The first painting of Outcome One, Suffer, Little Children is a distorted portrait of Mother Theresa, often used as a symbol for the charity of the Catholic church. This characterisation is a fabrication and is not a reflection of the saint, who is responsible for the proliferation of HIV and systemic abuse of Southeast Asian children. The first contact many queer people have with a rejection of their gender or sexuality is with religious entities that demonise non-normativity. The second painting of Outcome One is A Portrait of a Queen Who Never Said That, which depicts trans creator Natalie Wynn as Marie Antoinette. It draws parallels between the propaganda that preceded and followed the reign of the French monarch and the stochastic terrorism experienced by queer community in the modern day. Outcome Three is a polyptych titled Self Socratic. It is a combination of oil painting, projection and reflective surfaces that examines the internal, typically self-critical, dialogue experienced by queer people. The presence of reflective surfaces pulls the viewer into the work as if to expose the private experience of self-flagellation.

Outcome Two rests between these sombre works as an antidote to the severity of their subject matter. My Face Hits the Side of Your Gaze is a portrait of the transgender philosopher, actress and artist Abigail Thorn. Oil paint renders the portrait on 1.2 square metres of gold leaf in a radiant display of queer joy. While the other outcomes communicate dire messages about the LGBTQI+ experience, this outcome communicates the resilience and beauty of members of the queer community. The reflective golden surface results in the painting being exceptionally bright from certain angles, resulting in the audience having to physically shift their perspective to view the portrait comfortably. It is a metaphor for someone being so resolutely comfortable in their joy that their radiance may be uncomfortable to others. Furthermore, the reflective nature of the surface can abstractly mirror subjects who get close enough to the canvas, implying this euphoria can be a communal experience. The title is a play on the Barbara Kruger work Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face, which is considered a feminist response to the male gaze and objectification of the female subject. The satirisation of the title takes the implied objectification of Kruger’s artwork, inverting the character into a subject with agency.

This body of work was based on research-led practice, drawing on the material of philosophers and artists. Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorn were the primary sources for my theoretical and philosophical research. Both are transgender video essayists with backgrounds in academic philosophy, consolidating theories in their own theatrical fashions. Their essays, along with the queer theory of Judith Butler, were the core of my research into gender identity, performativity, phantasms and phenomenology. Portraits give a literal face to these concepts and are an opportunity to explore representations of queerness in future practice.”