The Final Girl
A term coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, the Final Girl is often a character within a horror movie that the audience follows until the end, where she remains the sole survivor of the monster's tirade of violence. She usually survives through her intelligence, purity, and vigilance (unlike her horndog friends, the Final Girl notices the breeches in normalcy set forth by the monster). In short, the movie cues to us as an audience that this girl is not like the other girls.
For this piece, I wanted the story behind the girl to remain ambiguous. We don't know if she is the monster or the Final Girl. We don't know if she is covered in her own blood or the blood of someone else. Is her smile sadistic, or is she relieved to have survived; by not providing all of the answers, the viewer is obliged to fill in the blanks themselves. This act of finishing the story ignites an internal consideration of biases and assumptions built from our visual culture.
Pluto Vs. Leatherface 2019
The title of the piece references the movie trope of two monsters facing off in the tradition of Freddy Vs. Jason, Alien Vs. Predator or Godzilla Vs. Mothra. I situate Bernini's Rape of Proserpina against a movie still from Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the diptych. I invited the viewer to contemplate their different cultural receptions. The violence in The Rape of Proserpina often goes unregistered for many viewers. They get seduced by the curves and the craftspersonship and never actually see the woman in peril. In contrast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was banned in several countries for twenty years.
Self Portraiture
In the early iterations of this body of work, I attempted to generalize the experience of horror, which created an emotional distance in the art I produced. My interest in horror is rooted in a painful history of sexual trauma. This distancing was the result of my own feelings of self-preservation and fear of vulnerability. When I found out that I was pregnant, I could no longer ignore how my own personal experience was playing a role in this work. It suddenly seemed impossible that the work should focus on my relationship and interpretation of horror rather than the distanced generalization I had been attempting. This personalization manifested through self-portraiture, both in a literal sense as well as representationally through my home.