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This work focuses on the idea of archetypal roles of women in modern culture, showcased through the lens, by using famous paintings as reference points. The idea is to look at women as they are while doing activities that they do daily. Women often times “work” in isolation, meaning they are mothers or do other “womanly” activities without knowing what other women do, or that other women do the same thing or struggle with the same issues. These photos are of everyday, average women doing everyday average undertakings such as laundry and putting children to bed. The idea to create these images using well-known paintings was to showcase the archetypal idea, which highlights that women are often the subject of works of art because what they do is important and necessary for any culture, in any time period. It is more what the women do that has changed and not the fact that their role in society, as people who help push the world forward, has not changed.
The Nightmare
Cristin Bobee’s The Nightmare reimagines a painting of the same title by the Romantic artist Henry Fuseli (1781). The Nightmare is part of a series of photographs by Bobee, collectively called “Women Folk,” that examines contemporary women’s experiences through the lens of canonical artworks.
Fuseli’s painting articulates anxieties about the unconscious during a moment of broader cultural critique of Enlightenment values of reason and logic. As a young woman sleeps, she is set upon by demons: an incubus, a spirit that preyed sexually upon sleeping women, and a horse called a mara that suffocated sleepers. When the conscious mind relinquishes control, all manner of horrors can emerge.
In Bobee’s version, the woman is beset not by the unconscious mind but by the responsibilities of motherhood. The homage is tongue-in-cheek: her sleep disrupted by a cherubic child, the woman makes eye contact with the viewer to include us in the joke, and we commiserate with her exhaustion. Concealed in shadow at the top left, a large dog contentedly appropriates the mother’s pillow. The intruders here are clearly beloved family members, rather than supernatural monsters. And yet, who can deny the nightmarish—even demonic—fog of sleep deprivation? The loss of rationality and logic in the face of extreme fatigue?
Pamela Stewart
La Grande Odalisque
This photograph is a modern twist on a famous Neoclassical painting and shows a modern woman compared to an idealized woman in the 1800s. Upon first glance we see a woman lying on her bed with her cat. It appears she has just taken a shower and she wears a pink robe and a towel wrapped around her hair, and no makeup. She is surrounded by “feminine” objects and toiletries: a doll, a pink hair bow, dried flowers, deodorant, a hairbrush, and hairspray. Strong contrasts between light and shadow focus our attention on the woman and her feline companion.
Bobee’s photograph is based on La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Ingres depicts a woman in a Turkish harem. She is nude, with elongated and unrealistic body proportions, and looks provocatively over her shoulder at the viewer. Bobee mimicked some important things like the pose and the lighting. But the differences are what is most important. Having this be a photograph shows a “real” woman with realistic proportions. She is shown in her place of comfort, all wrapped up rather than nude and on display like in the painting, and rather than holding a fan she is being kept company by her cat.
Ingres presented viewers with a fantasy; Bobee gives us reality.
Sierra Ellis
Judith and Holofernes
Liberty
Self-Portrait
Red Stockings
Folies Bergere
Girl with the Pearl
Ophelia
The Crystal Ball
The Nutgathers
Truth Coming out of her well