Bisquit Factory Exhibition -       LA Magazine interview

Making the F-word fashion

We are four female painters, Sabina Mlejnek (Austria), Birgitte Moos (Denmark/USA), Vibeke Knudsen (Denmark) and Suzanne Russell (USA/Denmark), with diverse national, cultural and educational backgrounds. 

  

We are working on a collaborative art project, and this is a project description and examples on sketches for common paintings. 

Our project is an experiment  in collaboration aimed at producing a series of large paintings, planned to be aproximately 13,1X6,5 ft, on the subject of notions female beauty and cultural identity. We plan to investigate our individual interpretations of the female body over time, as we collaborate to produce paintings in which the only rule is, that we may not stop each other via verbal responses to each other’s painting during the work period. Painting over each other’s work and adding to each other’s work is allowed.

The project is about the group’s working methods and dynamics. For this reason, the dynamics of the group will be documented each day through a variety of media, including video recordings and questionaires. We concider creating a website for the project, with blogs and photographs, documenting the paintings’ stages and development. The working process will be reflected in the dynamics of the paintings.

A flirtation with culturally defined ideas like ego and self, is implicit in our proposed working method and 

subject matter. These ideas will be investigated and, hopefully, 

illuminated by the content of the paintings themselves. Grabbing the 

spotlight and worshipping beauty. 

Can we let go of our egos? Can we produce paintings, that contain 

references to a wide-range of styles, because we have different talents, tools and references? 

Will the paintings function as symbols and aesthetically as paintings when the content is made up of a sort of cultural hacking?

Part of our project is to exhibit our collaborative paintings in each 

of the countries where we are from.

We expect the essence of our collaborative paintings to be a 

culmination of our observations about female beauty, especially as 

it is portrayed in mass media throughout the world. 

Ideals of female beauty have been articulated in Egypt, in Dante’s Italy, in art and theater, in film and television, and in advertisements. The glamour system. Especially in the West, women are given the leading role of “Figure Magnifique,”  a mythical role that tries to convince the viewer, that these women are real and represent female beauty.

As a possible consequence of society’s rejection of natural look as beautiful, our paintings will comment on the scientific methods that are available to achieve beauty at any cost. 

Female beauty is an indicator of success and a staus symbol. Stategies for seduction are defined in the media and the myths they create. The relationship between the sexes are affected.

Through media images we become aware of our obsessive attantion to 

appearances. The perfect body. Our body becomes our identity. Our identity becomes a projection of our body as a social construction, 

in which the conventional meaning of the word ”object” describes the female body, and its status in terms of time and place.

Many international female artists work with hybrid artistic expression 

in which they combine, for example, photography, video, installation and 

performance art. This can be interpreted as a rejection of painting 

as a traditionally patriarchal medium, with the masterpiece as its result.

Painting is not related to gender in Denmark in the 21s century. In our 

project , we wish to use painting as a genderless media through which we, 

as female artists with different nationalities, show the world that 

we use the oldest and most traditional art medium as part of 

our contemporary investigation.