Artist's Statement Project 1

What is the female form and how do we define it?

While working on this project I found myself drawn to this question. I was curious to see the outputs of the female body that were created by artificial intelligence and random generators. The ‘This Person Is Not Real’ website was very good at creating believable women, but what inspired me the most were the women with distorted features. There were girls with deformed hands, eyes on their elbows, and third arms, but they were all still recognizable as women.

With this glitch project, I wanted to create a commentary on feminine identity. There are no real women in this collection, just forms of female impersonation. There’s more literal forms of female interpretation, such as drag. Even in these female forms, there are deviations from what is the traditional standard of beauty. These deviations, such as Sasha removing her wig, reveal that femininity isn’t standardized, but instead can take many different forms without being overtly feminine.

Even the illustration of mine that I glitched does not contain a real woman, Noodle is a fictional character from a fictional band with no ‘human’ identity tied to her. The same can be said for the glitched collage. The statue in the background of course isn’t a real woman, but instead an idealization based on the beauty standards for women. I distorted a plethora of female figures, illustrating different forms of the female body to show that identity is changing and expression is not universal.