SELF: Portraits + Places

BRENDA GOODMAN JULIE HEFFERNAN ELISA JENSEN

SELF: PORTRAITS + PLACES

BRENDA GOODMAN • JULIE HEFFERNAN • ELISA JENSEN

CURATED BY:

MELINDA STICKNEY-GIBSON

EXHIBITION AT:

WOODSTOCK BYRDCLIFFE GUILD | KLEINERT/JAMES CENTER FOR THE ARTS | WOODSTOCK, NY

How do women see themselves when they are set free from the male gaze? One place to ﬁnd the answer is to look at the self-portraits of women artists. These works often exhibit a freedom from social expectations and an interiority that deﬁes the conventions of traditional portraiture.

SELF: portraits + places presents the works of three women artists whose work plumbs the depths of female subjectivity. Each takes a distinctive approach to self exposure, but they share an aversion to self-ﬂattery or deception. Instead they invite us into their rich and often unsettling interior worlds.

Brenda Goodman offers an unsparing version of the old trope of the artist the studio. She presents herself surrounded by her own paintings. Her exposure here is both literal and emotional — though her face is obscured, she shows us her overweight naked body. The expressionist brushstrokes create a continuity between her own body and that of her works, suggesting that the paintings on the walls are as much, or perhaps more, a part of her essence than is her physical body. Julie Heffernan also sometimes paints herself in the nude, but here self exposure takes place in the context of fantastical environments that

owe a great deal to art historical conventions of the baroque and roccoco periods. The female ﬁgures in her works are at one with a pulsing overgrown natural world to the extent of seeming, at times, to meld with it. These wild women refuse to be tamed or objectiﬁed. Instead they exude a sensuality that celebrates the pleasures of the senses and the embrace of a free-wheeling imagination.

The paintings of Elisa Jensen are not overtly self portraits. Instead, she uses the motifs of the window and domestic interior as metaphors to suggest the experience of being inside looking out. Here the house, historically presented as the women’s sphere, stands in for the artist’s body and mind. Windows become eyes that look out on the world and we are made aware of the contrast between an interior that is both sheltering and conﬁning and an exterior world that beckons with light, color and also perhaps danger.

Departing from the reportorial description that is often so much a part of the portrait genre, these three artists extend a bridge between their inner lives and their viewer’s own experiences. They provide a mirror for our shared fears, desires and hopes.

SELF: PORTRAITS + PLACES • ELEANOR HEARTNEY •

The concept of “self” is a very large and complex idea, one that is not easily deﬁned or limited to a singular criteria, but ﬂuid and the very essence of the word “individual”.

The artists chosen for this exhibition explore the notion that “self” can be represented by images of our physical selves, our personal mythologies, or the actual spaces we live in. All of us are inescapably all of those things.

• MELINDA STICKNEY-GIBSON •

SELF: PORTRAITS + PLACES : CURATORS STATEMENT

BRENDA GOODMAN

SELF-PORTRAIT 5, IN THE STUDIO , 2004 • OIL ON PAPER, 16” X 14”