A work on paper of Shoshanna Weinberger is in the collection of The Newark Museum, in Newark NJ *.
Goldie She Fox.
I was born in Kingston, Jamaica and came to America as a young child. I moved to New Jersey and had a pretty active life. Both of my parents were artists so I had a creative childhood. I got my undergraduate degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I graduated in 1995 and then I got my masters at Yale School of Art in 2003. I now reside in New Jersey where I have a studio.
Muffin Top Banana Bottom.
(below a few quotes out of an interview on Uprising News, December 7, 2013. Interviewer: Clelia Coussonnet)
‘I consider what popular culture defines as feminine beauty to be is skewed and distorted. Making connections with the awkwardness as a female growing-up, trying to define myself within a context of regional, social, and cultural beauty. Reflecting on my personal issue, the media and Hollywood. I am exploring that the social norms are abnormal. Excessive plastic surgery and body dysmorphia are just one of many avenues that I explore. My drawings relate to all women as each of us see magazines and deal with the global media culture of beauty that in many ways comes at us from various avenues. I believe that it is a part of our obsession that extends beyond beauty but cultural ideology.”
Collection of Strange Fruit.
“I am trying to present an exaggeration of aesthetics that result in imagery depicting excess, malformed and decapitated bodies, mutations of multiple-mouths, breasts and buttocks. I am displaying only the parts that are desired: lips, legs, ass, breasts and hair. I am reducing to the most sexualized and then repeating it removing everything else and leaving parts.”
“The figures are suggestive, submissive and powerful. Found tangled, hogtied and suffocated with props associated within femininity such as bras, thongs, thigh-hi stockings, jewelry and high-heels. Consciously framing my subjects as specimens, in the survey tradition, these portraits remain within a border at times, suspended inside the drawing. Styled with hair from my personal experience, these figures are found wearing cornrow braids, un-kept locks, pressed out curls and pigtails, creating a sense of familiarity, confusion, humor and tension.”
Menage à Trois & Pleasure Bead.
“I want my drawings allude to the psychology of coexisting in human and animal form as well as forms grotesque and sexualized. I like playing with the idea of creating highly sexualized images and then displaying the works individually or in groups, I allows me to see the otherwise sexual objects as natural objects recorded in historical surveys much like the ones made in the 1800s in my native West Indies. I consider myself a visual anthropologist examining female archetypes. Installing combinations of drawings, I create a collection of images on paper that present as one work. These wall installations are displayed in the style of the modernist grid or are hung salon-style. Both presentations are to distinguish the variations of archetypes that I interrupt. The groupings display multiple variations under one context much like a comparative studies akin to the variations of a butterfly collection that presents the unique evidence of variation and mutation as a single image.”
“I believe my drawings touch on a boarder cultural range of body portraiture. Although there is a vast history of Western culture creating myths based on difference and fear of femininity as viewed within a male-culture. My drawings are a body of work that explore contemporary connections stemming from the myth of ‘otherness doing otherness things’ as well as my addressing/defining cultural stereotypes, and historical references of subjugated women as modern-day Hottentots alluding to Sarrtjie Baartman, Josephine Baker and branching out to contemporaries, from Jennifer Lopez, Snookie to the infantile Honey-Boo Boo. Recreating a visual psychology in the drawings is captured in the beauty distortion found in prepubescent pageant toddlers, teenage girls, strip-club dancers, West-Indian Dancehall performers, pop-culture icons, and even self-portraits.”
The Golden Stocking, 2013.
* No picture available.