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I perform scenarios that give visibility to the conflicts of desire and identity as I experience them. Through the camera, I am able to transgress the limits of my body in order to express and reflect upon the nature of these experiences in ways that might otherwise be impossible. The staging of theatrical, intimate, and erotic events allows the viewer to witness and be implicated in these internal struggles. |
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“My representation of the female body becomes the site of both its concealment and its investigation.”
Cortney Andrews, Somebody, 2009. C-print, 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Female Subjects, Liminal Spaces
Cortney Andrews
I perform scenarios that give visibility to the conflicts of desire and identity as I experience them. Through the camera, I am able to transgress the limits of my body in order to express and reflect upon the nature of these experiences in ways that might otherwise be impossible. The staging of theatrical, intimate, and erotic events allows the viewer to witness and be implicated in these internal struggles.
In my imagery, the representation of the female body becomes the site of both its concealment and its investigation. The images are fetishistic, fixating on parts of the female body—hands, limbs, and hair—as well as on the disconcerting objects and gestures that constrain, rupture, and conceal the body. This process of fetishizing and masking covers but also attracts, acknowledges, and denies the spectator’s desire for what is hidden. The masquerade gives agency to the female subject by suggesting multiplicity rather than a specific, fixed identity; as such, it can be shaped and changed to reflect the process of becoming. The female subject is not positioned in one specific place (where she may conveniently serve as the Other), but allowed to exist in different spaces with multiple narratives, contradictions, and overlap.
Using theatrical sets and environments, the images evoke the setting of desire, a place where conscious and unconscious meet. The objects, clothing, and spaces become, to use Rosalind Krauss’s term, “surrogate surfaces” that mirror the subject’s gesture and emotion—while also suggesting a performance.
I am interested in exploring the nature of boundaries—between intimacy and violence, pleasure and pain, love and death. The female subject performs within these liminal spaces, forcing the viewer to question his or her own constructs of selfhood and otherness, lover and beloved, subject and object. The resulting images convey the deconstruction of binary, fixed, and hierarchical organizations that inform how one looks at and understands depictions of female sexuality, desire, and identity.
