Bio:
Liza Brenner is Professor of Painting and Melissa Meade is Dean of Humanities, Communication. Liza holds an MFA in Painting and an MA in Art Education from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and trained at the British Institute of Florence in Florence, Italy Before that Liza earned a BFA in Drawing and a BS in Communication from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Melissa holds an M.A. and PhD from the University of Washington and a BA from Purdue University. Her scholarship, teaching, and thinking has been at the intersection of media studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis.
Artists Statement:
Enchantress and Zoomer are part of The Medusa Project, a larger piece of work comprised of a series of paintings and texts. In the series are pairs of images and mini-essays, each focused on a word representing slang or archetypal expression for womanhood. Drawing from intersectional feminist history, material culture, psychoanalysis, and communication theory, the Medusa Project explores female subjectivity through each gendered word (and there is a word for each letter of the alphabet). The series identifies words that have animated collective female identity across history, contexts, and difference, evoking fantasies of liberation as well as fantasies of gender itself. As an interplay of form and narrative, the articulation of imagery with words serves as an invitation to think pluralistically about gender and to find fissures in inherited ways of thinking about gender as a binary. Through the frame of the Medusa myth and the notion of power in seeing, the series thinks through concepts of the gaze, power, resistance, joy, and dissonance. The relationship between language and imagery is meant to be evocative rather than didactic, and exploratory rather than definitive. The Medusa Project is part the ongoing work of coalitional and intersectional feminist art.
E is for Enchantress
Image: Liza Brenner, MFA
Text: Melissa Meade, PhD
“Can we all just say she was right!”
Decades after the enchantress tells us the truth, the audience performs gleeful gratitude. But for this one it’s too late, we’d hollowed her out. More realist than soothsayer, she was once given a public platform for her talents, and one of her talents was showing us our battlegrounds. But when we consulted our oracle and she destroyed the image of a religious leader for all to see, she became our Cassandra, and the wrong kind of crazy.
Crazily, there’s a right side of crazy. These enchantresses are bestowed and they mesmerize, beguile, some say bewitch. If they alight with beauty or sensuality even better, and the seekers can hold onto fantasies of colonization and control with a tinge of danger and excitement. The mutual fear that brings seekers together with their enchanters informs the divinations. Enchantresses illuminate what’s right up-front center, catching the currents, and converting nonbelievers with their direct line to other worlds. On a pedestal or stage, certainly at a distance, enchantresses convert observation and canniness into rituals of materiality. Crystals, tea leaves, salts, placentas, animals, song, skin, clothing, weapons, these are the ephemera of the freedom-seekers.
“ You asked if I'm scared
And I said so”
Sinead O’Connor, The Emperor's New Clothes
Z is for Zoomer
Image: Liza Brenner, MFA
Text: Melissa Meade, PhD
She the Mother zooms in, and that’s when they know they will be cared for. They will be nourished or soothed, and if they’re lucky, both. She the Worker zooms in, and that’s when they know they’ll be tended to; titillated, comforted, or alienated, wherever the commerce leads. He the Brave zooms in, alongside They the Artist, and that’s when we know we are free.
To zoom is to labor, and all zoomers labor. A life force, they transform and disrupt. Developing at their own pace and at various times, alongside hormonal changes, whether uninvited or induced. They bounce, sag, flatten, leak, ache, tingle, grow, shrink, worry, fulfill, comfort, mutate... They can be a source of pride for some, shame for others, zoomer or non-zoomer, depends who you ask. Despite technologies of gender and attempts to control, restrain, or diminish their importance, zoomers remain a life-giving. Oral desires are pre-language and never leave us.
(In another universe Zoomers are hot chicks with big tits.)