Preliminary Materials (Citizen)

 

Preliminary Materials (the  erase project), was initially inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953. Like Rauschenburg, I wanted to create an artwork from a ready made, utilizing the act of erasing and removal as opposed to the accumulation of marks. Rauschenberg wanted to erase a drawing by an artist he idolized. The finished piece by Rauschenberg shows the residue of a psychologically loaded act which simultaneously pays homage and celebration whilst creating provocation and exemplifying destruction.  My aim for this project was to combine this psychologically loaded act of removal with images of women in advertising taken from glossy fashion magazines. These hyper-real images of airbrushed women are the by-products of capitalist consumer culture designed to seduce and consume through the continuous recreation of identity. Reflecting upon Tiqqun’s ‘Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young- Girl’, the ‘Young-Girl” becomes not a gendered concept but an examination of the embedding of youth and femininity (living currency) into the cogs of the capitalist machine, denying and excluding experiences of love and creativity in favor for passive economic, political and social obedience.