Art visual np2

From Joanna Crichlow's Blueprint series  Perhaps the artists' most inevitable subject is herself. After all, we map our experiences and react to the world around us through the prism of who we are, what we are, what we have experienced, what we have not. Art could be a record of someone , through the medium of recording something . One thing artists Brianna McCarthy and Joanna Crichlow have in common is a direct engagement with the body in their work. This is, in fact, an engagement with their own bodies and, by extension, an engagement with the implications of their personal spaces in society. In a sense, all art is an engagement with the body: produced by the body, often depicting the body, reflecting the body via inanimate forms (mountainous landscapes, empty rooms). For if art reflects the artist, then she must admit that she is ultimately a body on a journey to something. "I juxtaposed images of mannequins with images of me," Crichlow said on Saturday night, expl...

"From my gaze as a plus-sized woman, the mannequin becomes a mental paragon to me, one which I do not exist within.  It is an image of perfection, the icon of what I refer to as "industrialized idealism".  Through the concept of blueprinting, my work challenges the constructs of industrialized idealism by juxtaposing images of my own body with those of mannequins, to provoke questions such as, 'Can there be a blueprint for the human body?'"-- Joanna Critchlow I'm fascinated by the dynamics of masking and unmasking, to be literal; the faces we wear and why and when and how we wear them. I have several I think, as do many of us. Sometimes we all want to be unrecognizable, a deliberate riddle or barely concealed as if wearing wax.  I'd been feeling a little constricted recently by my own ideas of meaning and relevance. I had forgotten the advice I read in a Marie Claire magazine (I think) when I was probably 15, "Do what you love and the rest comes...