Amazons, Dream of Venus (after Dalí), and Drawing Back the Golden Fleece
by
Kim Hoeckele
Archival Pigment Print, 40 x 71 inches
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Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 25 inches
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Archival Pigment Print, 40 x 50 inches
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© Kim Hoeckele. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Statement
My interdisciplinary artistic practice spans photography, video, and performance. Across projects, I restage male-dominant viewpoints perpetuated throughout the Western Canon’s literary, art-historical, and philosophical works. I use an archive of source material appropriated from antiquity to pop culture to examine the representation and exclusion of female-presenting bodies. I’m particularly interested in how notions of beauty and power within the Western Canon impact contemporary culture.
In my current project, The Long Confidence (2021-), I cull through art-historical, fashion, commercial, and vernacular images to make photographs that deconstruct male-authored pictures of women. Appropriating from art history, amateur pornography, and fashion photography, I stage layered tableaux and self-portraits, explicitly centering source images. I make formal comparisons through the use of color, composition, and pose in the tableaux to unify source imagery and invite comparisons. Each photograph is titled after a central art historical work, which is the starting point for my stage-like set. For example, the photo "Drawing Back the Golden Fleece" is titled after a painting made by Salvador Dalí of the same name. The painting depicts a classical, white, nude woman from behind; drawing from the palette and pose, I constructed a tableau that exclusively presents women from behind, placing the Venus Callipyge, amateur pornography, Beyoncé, Victoria's Secret advertisements, and work by Peter Paul Rubens all in direct, formal relationship together. By isolating these images from their original context, I am challenging the inherent hierarchy between art, commercialism, and pornography, emphasizing ways in which women's bodies are censored across media.
Similar to the tableaux, I begin with a canonical photographic work to make the self-portraits in The Long Confidence, and each photograph is titled to refer to the original. The modernist and surrealist works I choose to reconstruct—photographs by Edward Weston, Paul Outerbridge, Horst P. Horst, and other 20th-century male photographers—have all influenced me in my formative years as a photographer. I am retrospectively engaging these photographs and the limiting and sometimes violent way women were depicted. I'm re-performing these works in my pictures, inserting myself into the frame as the author. My photographs call attention to the act of looking-- a camera lens returns the viewer's gaze, or a set indicates a performance—and examine the slippage between when the body is a subject being empowered or subjugated.
