Difficult Beauty: Blue Ruin Returns with an Exhibit with an Unconventional Take on the Human Body

Your body is at once the most private and most public thing about you. It’s out there for everyone to see, and yet we are all guilty of going to lengths of varying degrees to camouflage, modify, accentuate, or reconfigure ourselves to fit what we think is acceptable for others to see. It’s this juxtaposition of public vs. private, of acceptable vs. unacceptable that the exhibit “In My Skin: Self-Portraits” explores, opening January 6, 2006, at Brew House Space 101.

Curated by Blue Ruin Gallery’s Tamara Moore and Amy Woodall, “In My Skin” features the work of four artists who have gone beyond what popular culture and mainstream media have proposed as the ideal model—and in the process give us a truer portrait of the real human body, with all its blemishes, scars, and incongruities, and what is beautiful about those truths. The startling and poignant work in this exhibit shows the human body at its most fractured and transcendent.

Photographer Thaniel Lee of New Albany, Indiana, documents his own body through the lens of the camera. “I was born with a condition called arthrogryposis; this condition has left me with limited use of my arms, legs, and fingers. Eleven operations have left me with many interesting scars, and starting in 2000, I began to document my body. I hope that my work makes people look at their own bodies and question the existing concepts of beauty that fill our current body-obsessed culture.”

<more> <view gallery>

Painter and mixed-media artist Erin Partridge of San Luis Obispo, California, delivers her work through the perspective of a recovering anorexic. In exploring her own recovery from anorexia, Erin’s paintings and drawings subtly juxtapose the perceived body image against the frail, bony reality. At once flush with color and washed out, the emphasis on skin and the face delve deeper into the emotional, mental, and psychological torment of the one struggling with anorexia. Words and patterns overlap the big-eyed, often fetal-positioned figure, showing the vulnerability and fear that chains her to her illness.

Caryn Drexl of Clearwater, Florida, creates beautifully crafted yet unsettling photographs of destructive/self-destructive views of beauty. In her sometimes Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraits, what is cearly a beautiful face and body becomes distorted into something shocking. As such, each piece delivers a one-two punch of recognition—what we classically perceive as beauty vs. a purposeful distortion that repels us.

Alexander Wilkins’s photographs document yet another aspect of the human body—our ability to change it. While going through the process of gender reassignment, Wilkins relays the changes his body goes through in its transformation from female to male. Their stark, frank assessment of body images that may at first seem simple and unremarkable become courageous as you recognize the depth of meaning that changes (such as the growth of facial hair, for instance) have for its owner.

Through this exhibit, Moore and Woodall want viewers to walk away with the knowledge of how destructive popular culture can be to an individual’s body image. And in viewing the photographs on display, recognize that the more you look at unconventional beauty and question the culture’s view of beauty the more you will find true beauty.

<Back>