The Medusa Project

The Medusa Project
Melissa Meade, Dean of Humanities - Text
Liza Brenner, Art Faculty - Paintings

*To view the text for this project, please visit the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery during regular operating hours.

The Concept:
The Medusa Project (working title) is a work in progress and will be a series of 26 paintings and mini essays, composed and written by Liza Brenner and Melissa Meade, respectively. Each set represents one word for each letter of the alphabet, and each word is an archetype or slang word for women. The series articulates visual imagery with language to explore the ways we characterize and talk about women. This category of women includes all who identify as such, whether or not assigned at birth, and in both historical and contemporary contexts. Informed by intersectional feminist history, material culture, and the interplay between form and narrative, it’s both excavation and reclamation, digging into the challenge of the question, “what is woman?” The series is also a love letter to the multiplicity of experience and language we have for women.

The Process:
We gab each week over zoom, while the global pandemic unfolds, the new civil rights movement takes shape, and while the climate changes reveal themselves in the form of fires, smoky air, and extreme heat. We talk about the complicated lives of women, our own lives as women, and the complications involved with talking about women. We find gendered words that interest us, that evoke imagery and ideas, and that contain depths of history and experience. We dissect the words used for women, looking for connections between the past and the present. We look for patterns, contexts, insights, fantasies, and, most of all, for the fissures in what sometimes feels like rigid expectations for gendered life. It’s part academic and part therapy, these conversations.
As Melissa writes, Liza unpacks each term to begin a painting or digital image. The challenge becomes how to walk the fine line between addressing the word versus addressing the picture plane more formally. Inevitably categories among the paintings have emerged, with some taking on a more literal interpretation of the word represented, and others resting on the surface, leaving the viewer to search for answers among the colors and shapes. Liza began with a set of vintage picture blocks, rearranging them for each painting. She also incorporated the image of an antique porcelain figurine, a figure that conjures a gender ideal that is both in and out of place in the paintings. The figure watches, absorbs, and calls to mind questions of race, class, and sexuality. As the project has grown, Liza found these initial parameters for the scenarios too restrictive and has moved into digital expression. This move from the blocks and figurine frees us somewhat, both literally and metaphorically, to continue on with the Medusa Project.