Artist Statement
Leah Evans
My practice is engaged with the complex experiences of young womanhood through reflections of contemporary understandings of femininity, while also contemplating both personal and shared memories of girlhood. My research involves a broad scope of subjects under this umbrella of femininity and youth, including the complex interactions between innocence and naivety in adolescence, challenging societal constructs and expectations of womanhood, and addressing the disturbingly common exploitation and fetishization of girlhood in its very essence. As a painter, I employ these themes through narrative imagery and scenes - both imagined and referenced. My photographically referenced pieces typically pull from family albums which capture my childhood experiences of sisterhood, but also older pictures that show the life of my mother near my age and before entering her own archetype of motherhood. Aesthetically I employ elements of hyperfemininity in my art, due to my own reflections of how these “coquette” stereotypes can be used simultaneously by feminine-presenting individuals to empower themselves but are often used in the broader context as a way of restricting and disenfranchising girls. Currently, my work is primarily engaged with the adolescent sphere of understandings of womanhood - addressing this period as the beginnings of many challenging emotions and a period where girls develop challenging emotions as the objectification of their image becomes an inescapable truth. This state of adolescent dysfunction isn’t tied solely to the physicality of this age, but also as an emotional state that we carry through a lifelong navigation fo what it means to be a woman. Scenes of small town environments often find their way into the work; worming their way out from my basement and sidewalk recollections of these close-knit yet close-minded communities. My research involves both niche and popular media, from Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and the work of artists such as Marlene Dumas and Ida Applebroog, to the mainstream brands of my studies with literature such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, films in the realm of Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003) and the music of Lana Del Rey and Mitski. By embracing the abject through commonly understood imagery, my work is able to address realities of womanhood and simultaneously reject societal ideals of femininity through a complex yet understandable approach.