Rosemary Meza-DesPlas

 

The personalization of social issues in a serial format is the framework for my artwork. Societal impositions upon body image, transformative perspectives about women and violence, and the socio-cultural burdens endured by women are the most recently explored topics. Social issues are viewed through a multifarious lens of mass media, social media and art history.

 

Wispy, curling tendrils, wiry, frizzy ends stitch through a picture plane to create images; I collect and sew my own hair into drawings which accentuate line and texture. Scratchy, nervous lines trail across a wall in my drawing installations. These large, on-site installations are drawn with conte; sometimes they incorporate vinyl appliques, liquid graphite and specialty fabric. Voluptuous layers of watercolor stain canvas and paper to create figurative forms. Washes of color depict the imperfections of flesh. The depiction of flesh is not merely about accuracy for color and form, but it is about having an eye for the bump -- and the lump-- and the chunk of blemished flesh.

 

“The body – what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend the body- is a medium of culture. The body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body.” (Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 1993) I examine gender role expectations and prevailing stereotypes in mass media through the lens of socio-cultural structures.