Dangling & Disrobing (disrobing)11, digital collage, custom size, custom price

Dangling&Disrobing is a project of self-narrativization based on a series of carefully staged and digitally manipulated photographs which acknowledge a woman's body as her most active and activating canvas as opposed to the depiction of the female nude as part of a revered tradition that allows her no agency to take authority over the depiction of her nudity or as Carolee Schneemann would have it " allows her no choice but simply to be available".

What happens if all labels are torn off? When all skin's shed? When all blood's bled? How to confine one's essence within the arbitrary layers of social expectations & obligations?

The dangling legs (subliminal and emotionally charged) represent associations of womanhood as body, emotion, soft, low, flesh, nature, nurture. Although digitally made, the experimental coloring, deep saturation, and the mimicking of light-dappled strokes are a direct reference to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's impressionistic young, porcelain-skinned females inThe Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), Cézanne's almost abstract geometrized forms in the famous Large Bathers, and Gauguin's synthetism while the compositional choices are heavily indebted to Louise Bourgeois's Suspension.

The disrobing process is shown through extreme close-up shots of the artist's body and various garments carelessly discarded, both body and clothes immobile yet able to provide a sense of movement and instability and implied vulnerability. They are full of cuts despite an effort been made for the stitching not to show and everything to appear as smooth as possible. Stitches, however, keep coming apart, again and again. These are what one might call the heavy moments, these are the times when one catches a glimpse of the divergent structure of life behind the stitched up cuts, when instead of what we are used to, we see the exposed and defenseless state of female representation especially when it comes to the often subtle and coded role of images in creating new knowledge.

• Visual Influences

Paul Cézanne's Bathers series - Paul Cézanne had spent his life studying the nude and exploring the relationships between people. At the end of his career, Cézanne created a series of bathers' paintings feeling no pressure to conform to painting trends.

Louise Bourgeois's Suspension (exhibition of hanging works) - The very physicality of Bourgeois’s work, its density and weight, is offset by the seemingly effortless, floating state in which they are presented.