Strait, Natalie

English

Carolina Digital Repository

  Dream Palace  Natalie Strait  Documents submitted to the Faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of the Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Art  2020  Approved by: Mario Marzan Lien Truong Beth Grabowski              © 2020  Natalie Strait ALL RIGHTS RESERVED           Artist Statement Under the heteropatriarchal framework of American society, women are constantly perceived through their relationship/proximity to men. From birth, we are flooded with images of ourselves. Sometimes these images are visual, as in advertising, art, and media. The visual images are often generic and objectifying, existing more as extensions of cultural tropes and visual signifiers than as honest, nuanced depictions of personhood. Sometimes they exist as spoken tropes – the ideal woman, the ideal wife, the crazy ex-girlfriend, the girl next door, the spinster, the dyke, the whore, the 10. When a woman is successful, she is rumored to have “slept her way to the top,” and when she acts out, it’s because of her “daddy issues.” Every life she lives and work she creates is viewed through and complicated by her femaleness – in lieu of herself she becomes a sister, a songstress, a daughter, a girlfriend, a Female Artist, a muse, overshadowed and simplified by a ghost of herself. Alongside relationships to men, female identity is also often perceived through ownership of objects. In a capitalist, object-focused society, person and item exist in conjunction, and purchasing and consuming objects (and displaying them publicly) is a measure of social worth and wealth. This experience of consumer culture and capitalism is gendered, creating an artificiality that comes with womanhood and femininity; external pressures (fashion magazines, websites, external opinions, societal norms) dictating what to do about almost everything, both consciously and subconsciously. This bleeds into the digital realm – Instagram and other social media platforms exist as an ever-present backbone to modern womanhood but also as places where these structures run most visible and rampant. We, as women, are both the images used to market products and societal ideals, and the target audience. My paintings explore the uncertainty of modern feminine authenticity, portraying complicated women in multiple states of being. The women in my paintings appear anxious, bored, hysteric, in love, regretful, at odds with themselves, at peace, posing, performing. They exist for themselves, while self-aware of the conditions in which they exist in and are viewed through. Their bodies are in a still dance; jutting out and gently grazing against the edges of the frame, spaces and shapes are abstracted into flatness, creating a coexisting duality between “real” and “unreal,” mirroring a dichotomy between what is perceived and what is objective, what is performed and what is felt.  I consider my paintings indirect self-portraits, painted empathetically from my own experience with navigating womanhood. Though my paintings are forged first through autobiography, the women I paint are rarely specific. Their personalities are developed from aspects of myself and my friends, partners, and communities, but their ambiguity also relates to an overarching, pervasive cultural gaze — a gaze that has continually genericized, flattened, and objectified women. I paint navigating this gaze, and introspective and self-explorative elements are key in both my execution and the viewing of my work. Swathed in fields of color, my paintings are phenomenological portraits, openings into realms of queer space. Compositionally and thematically referencing vernacular photography, their bodies are contained in  the frame, gazing back at the viewer in a knowing glance, or looking away, engaged in an action, or enraptured in an intimate relational moment. With both, they are refuting passivity, holding agency over their bodies and spaces and in the way that they could be perceived. As a woman and a lesbian painting mainly female subjects, my act is inherently political. As figurative paintings, they’re in immediate dialogue with the artistic canon and its history of representation, but their scope of inquiry extends critically beyond the art world, upending and questioning existing ways of how women have and continue to be portrayed and viewed in this society largely centered around men.  Informed by my own autobiographical experience and observation, I paint to navigate this realm of perception and to imagine a quiet utopia – an open realm that deconstructs and questions existing perceptions of women and queer people. Natalie Strait UNC Chapel Hill MFA Thesis Defense April 29, 2020“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”John Berger,Ways of SeeingMegan Fox, 2008Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, 2004Cosmopolitan Magazine, March 2007Calvin Klein Euphoria perfume ad, 2011Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester in the tv show GleeScreenshot of a Tumblr post I reblogged in January 2013, at the age of 15Archive of my tumblr blog in January 2013Still from the film Lady Bird (2017) dir. Greta Gerwighttps://www.rookiemag.com/2012/02/not-creepy-at-all/Still from the film Juno (2007) dir. Jason Reitmanhttps://www.rookiemag.com/2011/12/tavi-room-decorating/Screenshots from my archive of bizarre Instagram adsLonely Weekend42x48”Acrylic on canvas2018Party for Two36x48”Oil on canvas2019West Elm/Business Bitch36x48”Acrylic and chunky glitter on canvas2018West Elm/Business Bitch36x48”Acrylic and chunky glitter on canvas2018Rose All Day46x52”Oil and acrylic on canvas2018Still from ‘Marie Antoinette’ 2006, dir. Sofia CoppolaViva Tempe30x40”Acrylic on canvas2018Blue Moon Friday36x48”Acrylic on canvas2019Iced30x48”Oil on canvas2019https://www.salon.com/2010/06/15/bros_icing_bros/Amy AdamsAmy AdamsRegretOil and acrylic on canvas48x52”2019Crystal's Friend, John CurrinOil on canvas, 201124 x 18 inchesDefault Windows XP WallpaperParis Hilton and Nicole Richie, 2004BP QueenOil, acrylic, and chunky glitter on canvas36x48”2020Florizona Gothicoil on canvas36x48”2020Basement Apartment HottieOil on canvas36x36”2020Me in my (terrible) summer 2019 basement apartmentHenri MatisseOdalisque au coffret rouge 1952Gilbert BakerArtist, activist, drag queen, creator of the rainbow flag (June 2, 1951 – March 31, 2017)The original 1978 pride flag had 8 colors, with symbolic meaning for each colorhttp://jungle2jungle.org/Walking the DogLisa Yuskavage2009Oil on linen77 x 65 in.MerlotLisa Yuskavage2017Oil on linen34 x 24 in.Blue Morpho (After Courbet)36x48”Acrylic, spray paint, chunky glitter, and pearlescent pigment on canvasLe Sommeil (The Sleepers)Gustave Courbet135 cm × 200 cm (53 in × 79 in)1866Oil on canvasTangerine LamentAcrylic and spray paint on canvas36x48”2020Cactus Cooler/December SunlightAcrylic and spray paint on canvas36x48”2020Tempe RococoAcrylic and spray paint on canvas36x48”2020Étant donnés (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)Marcel DuchampSculptural diorama36x48”1946-1966Cave PaintingRobin F.  Williams78" x 102"oil on canvas2014High LifeAcrylic and spray paint on canvas36x48”2020Self-Portrait by Judith LeysterJudith LeysterOil on canvasc. 163374.6 cm (29.4 in) × 65.1 cm (25.6 in)Self-Portrait as the Allegory of PaintingArtemisia Gentileschi1638–39Oil on canvas96.5 cm × 73.7 cm (38.0 in × 29.0 in)

Dream Palace

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Dream Palace

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