Mom

2017 - Painting (Painting)
45.72 x 42.55 cm

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity. This small painting, titled Mom , is a concise, eloquent visual statement. Many of her paintings incorporate found imagery, family photos, and everyday objects. The artist pursues issues of gender by drawing upon the vernacular of popular culture, namely newspapers, television, and cinema. In this work, she includes imagery of long fingernails, repeating the forms throughout the composition with painted asymmetrical pink ovals. The work also features an image of a front door and background with the phrase “RRRING” seemingly borrowed from a comic strip. The work is a meditation on femininity and the conventions of womanhood, such as getting married and becoming a homemaker.

When she was fifteen Sadie Benning’s father gave her a kiddie PixelVision camera, a device that recorded grainy black-and-white video on standard audio cassettes. She promptly made showstopper single-channel videos—including Me and Rubyfruit and Jollies . The short videos captured her feelings of angst, confusion and alienation, as she was coming out in middle America. Benning was the first sixteen-year-old to show her work at MoMA. As she continued to make grainy narrative videos, she joined the feminist post-punk band, Le Tigre. Benning slowly moved on to installation, performance, drawing, painting, and then to sculpture. Her practice challenges traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, and probes intimate subjects that are close to her personal life.

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