OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Extended Practice

Sara and Angela with their sons

Extended Practice, founded by artists Angela Lopez and Sara Holwerda, is an artist-led curatorial project focusing on creating family accessible events, exhibitions and screenings that support and make visible the work and needs of artists who are also mothers. Upcoming events include the one-night exhibition Ways We Make - Mothers of Color Nurturing and Building Our Creative Communities. This is the second event lead by Wisdom Baty and it takes place on November 7th (5:30 - 7:00pm) at Experimental Station. Also at Experimental Station on November 19th, Extended Practice will host Empowered Production: An Afternoon for Artist Parents with Selina Trepp, which includes an artist talk and discussion by Selina Trepp, a brief break-out session and networking lunch, and a family-friendly performance by Spectralina (Dan Bitney and Selina Trepp). In Summer 2018, Extended Practice will host a new artist moms group at Roman Susan in Rogers Park. This will be an activated exhibition that rotates with work featuring and curated by participating artists. In this way, new moms will get direct social support, as well as an immediate space and time to show and discuss their work. Angela and Sara both live, work and parent in Chicago.

OtherPeoplePixels: How did the two of you meet and what led you form Extended Practice?

Angela Lopez: We met at a networking event at Chicago Artists Coalition. They set up something that was like a speed dating scenario, where the participants hopped from person to person with brief five minute introductions. Someone in that group organized a critique group with us and other participants that lasted about a year. We fell out of touch, then ran into each other again at a prenatal yoga class. It was a surprise because I didn't know that Sara was pregnant. Our kids are only a month and a half apart.


Sara Holwerda: We’re both a part of EyeSplice Collective, and the artist who founded that collective, Megan Hildebrandt, is a mom. She reached out to see how many of us that were moms wanted to organize an exhibition of artist mothers. It was literally a one sentence email that sparked this, and since Angela and I were both in Chicago and somewhat isolated brand new moms with infants, we decided to start meeting to work on it (and to get outside and talk to another adult!). The exhibition idea lead us to think about other kinds of programming we wanted to see, which lead to our DCASE grant application, which lead us here.

Megan Hildebrandt working with her daughter, 2017

OPP: How did you go about connecting with other mother/parent artists?

AL: We started with people we knew then began to branch out from there. Selina Trepp, for example, was someone I went to when I was pregnant so she was one of the first people we connected with. She then connected us with Christa Donner. I met Tracy Marie Taylor and Emily Lindskoog at a new moms group and was so happy to learn that they are also practicing artists. We have a growing list of more people that we want to connect with in the future. Some we already know through our artist networks and others that people have refered to us.
 
SH: Selina and Christa, who started Cultural ReProducers, have both been amazing resources, especially at the beginning of this project. Also, several of our artists are, or were, a part of EyeSplice collective, and these artists live outside of Chicago. Angela also had some connections to other moms in Chicago that she met at a new moms group that we started doing studio visits with. I stumbled on a manifesto by Wisdom Baty about being a single mother of color, so we reached out to her and she’s now leading an event series with us. We’ve got our ears to the ground and we’re slowly branching out. We have plans to connect with people we know in Kansas City, Detroit and New York City, to potentially do events in those cities. We’ve made some international contacts through our latest animation screening, including with some women that are active in the artist/mother groups in the UK.

Wisdom Baty with her daughter

OPP: Talk about how you highlight the artists on the Extended Practice website.

AL: A big part of the project for us was making artists who are mothers more visible. In a very literal sense we want to have actual images of artists with their children in the studio. There are not many images of this kind, and they can be very impactful to young parents or artists thinking about having children. Equally important, these images ideally bring attention to how many artists are mothers.

We plan on growing this page with many more artists. Before adding anyone, we really want to get to know the artists, visit their studio and understand their practice. These are artists that we feel are making strong and challenging work while balancing parenthood. 

SH: Angela and I are like loudspeakers for our artists. We hope more artists who are parents see this work and read these stories, and we’re glad to help facilitate this growing network. We act as curators, in that we’re making a lot of decisions—on and off the website. Most of these decisions revolve around presenting the artists’ work in the best light possible and making sure we’re aligning with our EP mission and best practices.

Christa Donner with her daughter

OPP: Why isn’t your own work as artists highlighted on the website? That seems like a very intentional decision.

AL: We actually do plan to add ourselves. We just haven't yet. Sara will select images and quotes from me, and I will do the same for her. Although there are many curatorial aspects to EP, it started with wanting to create what we needed at the time. We wanted to feel connected to and supported in an art world, that is not very receptive or understanding of the particular challenges of being a mother. In many ways, we really started this for ourselves but know that it needs to be much larger to work well. We will add ourselves because we are not separate from the people that we are working with.

Sara Holwerda. baby love, 2017. Mixed Media. 23" x 12"

OPP: Tell us a bit about each of your individual practices. Sara?

SH: My work is part auto-biographical, part social commentary, and has included performance, video, animation and performing objects. I am interested in the very rigid and socially-constructed ways women—and men—are expected to perform gender. It’s effectively a form of social control. My work is definitely figurative and usually centers around the female figure. I’m drawn to any hyper-feminine performing roles: the chorus girl and pop star, food service roles, burlesque dancers, drag queens. The fact that I’m raising a son now is making me think more broadly about gender expression, and similarly constrictive expectations for masculinity. In a lot of ways, gender expression for boys is much more limited than for girls.

Right now I’m working on a series of hand-fans that I started before I was pregnant. I saw a show in Paris at the Museum of Decorative Arts a few years ago that was a massive private collection of advertising paraphernalia dating back to the Victorian era and the first printing presses. I saw a set of “portrait fans” that were functional objects as well as advertisements. There was one fan in which all the tines of the fan were a human figure. I was like, “it’s a chorus line!” The repetition, the flattening and the reduction of the human figure to a decorative object that you can manipulate are threads from past work that have carried into this project. I just made one that is a selfie I saw of Kim Kardashian while she pregnant for the first time that I couldn’t get out of my head.

Angela Lopez. Living Prosthetic, 2017. Ceramic.

OPP: What about your work, Angela?

AL: My work explores embodiment as a way to reveal primal instincts, desires and fears. The surfaces are often slippery, gooey, fleshy and in flux. They move between various states of metamorphosis, exploring the familiar and the unknown of embodiment. I work in watercolor, video and sculpture.

I currently have a show up, Magic Like Death, at Indiana University Northwest Arts and Science Gallery (Gary, IN). The work is heavily influenced by my son, although not directly about him. Watching his senses develop and his body grow—including new knee caps and a closing fontanelle—is fascinating to me and reinforces the concepts in my work in new ways. He is strong and healthy, but I am always aware of his corporal and psychological fragility. This has highly reinforced and further developed the concepts of the familiar and unknown of embodiment in my work. There are many living prosthetics and crystals growing on dismembered body parts in my newer works.

Angela Lopez. Paula's Thumb. 2017. Watercolor on paper

OPP: Although I’m not a parent, I can imagine the biggest challenge for parent artists is having less time available for making. Is that true or is that a simplification?

AL: Yes, it is true. I used to have what I'd call “ramp up time.” I'd get to my studio, leisurely clean up, move things around, snack, stare, think, and/or read before getting started. That is just a silly thought now. Studio time is very broken up and squeezed in. The “ramp up” time is now any time I'm not in studio. When I get the time to work, I know exactly what I'm going to do and just get started.

SH: I actually find lack of sleep to be the worst part. You can adjust to the lack of time, but there’s no substitute for sleep! The magnitude of exhaustion is not something you can know without experiencing it. I think Angela and I had the same sort of expectations—that now seem crazy—for parenthood, like our lives and art practices would continue and there would just be a baby chilling in the room that wouldn’t take up all of our energy. NOPE.

Sara Holwerda. Chair Dance (Adagio), 2013. Performance Still.

OPP: Aside from exhaustion, what changed in your practice after your son was born?

SH: The lack of time has forced me to contend with some of my self-destructive thinking habits. As a new artist mom, I was afraid to waste time on failures. I spent a few months just sewing baby hats and quilts for other people’s kids because I could complete them in a few hours. Finally, I had to confront that I was avoiding the part of the process when you’re making things that aren’t good. I had to convince myself that if I went to the studio for three hours and all I did was make a bunch of seriously terrible stuff that I would never show anyone, that it was okay. I’ve never been so happy to not have any shows lined up! My studio is filled with failures and I am kind of proud of it.

In terms of content, the experience of pregnancy and parenting is yet another area in which women are expected to perform a certain way. It’s like everything I’ve done has been reaffirmed and amplified already by this experience. I didn’t even know the half of it before. I will return to the performance part of my practice when I sort through all the crazy things that have happened to my body. I’m not sure all my bones have returned to their normal places, if that’s even ever going to happen!

Sara Holwerda. Homemaker (climbing), 2013. Inkjet Print. 14" x 20"

OPP: Were there surprising benefits to your art practice that you didn’t anticipate?

AL: I’m much more focused and use my studio time more efficiently. I am more selective with opportunities and applications. I didn’t expect—or even want—my work to be so strongly influenced by motherhood. I’m really glad that in many ways being a mother has reinforced existing concepts in my work.

SH: This trajectory of EP is a huge one. We received the DCASE Individual Artist grant in the first few months of our sons’ lives, and I certainly hadn’t anticipated doing this kind of organizing and curating while my son was so young. Being able to connect to other artists through motherhood has been awesome. I love our studio visits and being able to extend the modest platform we have to help elevate other artists that I admire. In my personal practice, parenting has given me a bit more perspective. For one thing, I have been forced to place more reasonable expectations on myself. There are things I just can’t do, and it’s easier for me to not even try to do those things now.

Angela Lopez. Untitled, 2016. ceramic.

OPP: What challenges do artist mothers specifically face?

SH: Mothers still carry the majority of the burden of childcare, especially when their children are young. Even in more progressive parenting partnerships, this still happens. Same-sex couples have been shown to have the best chance at finding some equality within in their parenting roles. In the art world, there’s no question that a father who is an artist will continue to have a career, whereas motherhood is often still presented as a career-ender for artists.

We’ve talked to lots of women who were explicitly warned by colleagues, mentors and professors that having a child would hurt their art career. Luckily I didn’t hear this much myself, but I did hear that there was a “right time” to do this, which is basically when you’re already fully established (and maybe also at the age where getting pregnant is more challenging or riskier).

We’re also interested in supporting mothers in the current political climate. We are barely able to get health care, maternity or paternity leave. Childcare is so expensive, and preschool isn’t free everywhere. It’s crazy. The struggle lots of artists have to even get paid for their work and their time is combined with the struggle lots of working and stay-at-home mothers have to get any kind of support outside of their families.

We do our best to support our artists with childcare, opportunities, and stipends. The money we are securing through grants goes to mothers who are artists to pay for their work and time, to parents who own businesses or run arts spaces, and to childcare providers (many of whom are also mothers!)

Pop Up Exhibit: Accumulated Gestures and Speculative Futures, 2017. Present Place Chicago. Featuring artists and mothers, Christa Donner and Megan Hildebrandt

OPP: What makes an art exhibit or event “child-welcoming and family-accessible?”

AL: More daytime events are an easy way to be more inclusive to people with young children. And to get changing tables in all bathrooms. In an ideal situation , a venue would provide a space for kids to play while parents look around and talk with other artists. Even better, they'd provide a caregiver (with experience and background check) in that space for younger kids. Oh, and kids are seriously drawn to outlets! They will find them when you're not even thinking about it. So put some covers on the ones that aren't in use.

SH: I have a toddler, and right now every event I would want to go to is dependent on my paying for childcare, coordinating with my husband’s schedule or having family help. Maybe I bring my kid instead, but then I have to plan around sleeping, eating and diaper changing. So many art events fall right at a child’s bedtime. Some of this burden should be on the venues and organizers to create spaces that are accessible for artists with family obligations. The implications of not making events accessible are far-reaching and contribute to underrepresentation in the art world. The consequences of not making events family-friendly are that it is exclusionary for mothers, single parents, and low income parents.

Mock-up for Extended Practice: New Moms at Roman Susan Gallery (Chicago), Summer 2018. The gallery space itself will be divided in two “zones” from floor to ceiling. The bottom half will be designed for children and the top half will serve as the exhibition space for the artists. The installation will show visually both the separation and interaction of the two worlds: the art world and spaces for children and babies.

OPP: What’s different at your events and what would you like to see at other art events?

AL: Childcare is the biggest asset to our events. It gives parents the opportunity to focus on each other and the art. Simply showing up is a huge challenge when you have children. The art world, that we look to for critical thinking, new ideas and philosophies, excludes a large underrepresented part of the population. Taking steps to be more accommodating can significantly help with growing and expanding the points of view in art.

SH: We also explicitly welcome nursing mothers, children and families with intergenerational events and activities. We find venues that can accommodate families and children with play spaces and changing tables! We offer real food and drink options to help families plan meals. We also do our best to schedule daytime events or have nighttime events start and end earlier to accommodate bedtimes. Keeping parents in the room is huge! Sometimes museums and galleries try to accommodate children and nursing mothers, but end up shoving them way off to the side where there is no art and no interaction.

We have a super tiny budget for these events in comparison to many organizations, and yet we have been able to offer many accommodations for parents. Clearly, we are not able to do all of these at once, and some events and venues do not lend themselves well to these considerations, but we do it. It is possible, and it’s time for these larger organizations to make better choices.

AL: Although we really want venues to change, a lot of our workshops and the upcoming talk with Selina, focus on strengthening the networks of artists who are mothers and brainstorming alternative venues and support systems. The work needs to happen on both sides. We want to find ways to support artists who are mothers and empower them to have a voice, position and representation in the art world.

To learn more about Extended Practice and their upcoming events, please visit extendedpractice.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indiana 2017). In March 2018, her solo installation Where Do We Go From Here? will open at Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois). In conjunction, the atrium will exhibit two-dimensional artwork by artists who were invited by Stacia to make new work also titled  Where Do We Go From Here?

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Sara Holwerda

Barmaiden (Frame 4)
2011
Digital Image
16" x 11.5"

SARA HOLWERDA is a performance and video artist who uses movement and dance to explore the limitations of the represenations of the female body in western culture. Her references are varied and include painting, burlesque, vaudeville, movies, contemporary pop music videos, and YouTube tutorials to name a few. Sara recently received her MFA from Cranbrook and now lives and works in Chicago, IL.

 

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your performances and videos involve movement and dance. Do you have a formal background in these fields?

Sara Holwerda: Yes. I figure skated competitively for over ten years, and, as part of my training, I did ballet and yoga. In college I took modern dance at the YMCA and fell into some barefoot dance performances with middle aged hippies in the woods. (I went to college in Ann Arbor!)

What stuck with me the most profoundly from my experiences as a figure skater are the athleticism, costumes, badly-cut music, and kitschy sensibility. I also spent a few formative years performing on a synchronized skating team with about twenty other girls. We were all dressed the same and had the same hair and makeup. We performed in circles and pinwheels and did kicklines... It was the closest I have ever gotten to being a Rockette, and it was bizarre in a lot of ways.

The experience of being active in a completely self-conscious way for all my teen years has followed me into my late twenties. Even though I'm only moderately active, I notice that much of my self-concept is still tied up in how my body looks and how it performs. There is something about being female that requires you to perform at some level all the time, and as an artist responding to this cultural condition, I feel the need to do performance work.

One and Three Women
2012

OPP: In many performances such as One and Three Women (2012) or The Fall (2012), you perform with others. Are you always the choreographer of these performances or are they collaborators in creating the work?

SH: In both of those performances, I am the director, choreographer, and costume designer/seamstress. These two performances are an interesting comparison. In One and Three Women, I am performing with the group intentionally because this piece is about both the shared experiences between women and the ways one person can be split and see herself in parts. It's also personal in a lot of ways, and it felt natural to be in it. In rehearsals, my other performers helped me visualize the movements, and there was some collaboration in those moments. It was a choreograph-as-you-go type process, in which I would trap us or tangle us up and have to figure out where to go from there.

For The Fall, I had a much larger cast—five dancers, a singer, a Tree of Knowledge, and three paparazzi—so I had to be more prepared with my choreography. I drew diagrams and sent PDFs to everyone to make rehearsals go faster. The scale of the project made it difficult for me to both direct and perform effectively. I performed as a Marilyn Monroe imitator, because I felt I needed to return to that role—when I was seventeen, I performed Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds" solo in an ice show. That solo became an unintentional drag performance failure! My wig came off during a layback spin, and my middle-aged male partners were so nervous that they could barely velcro the "Cartier" on my wrists or lift me up. My inability to fit into this hyper-feminine role, which has been so iconic for so long, was part of my inspiration for the piece. Before I did this performance, I created the Marilyn fuchsia dress from that number as a burlesque costume, and I worked tearing off the costume bit by bit in The Fall. In retrospect, after going through the whole process of staging that work, I realized that I didn't need to perform this role. I learned an important lesson: with a large cast, I can direct more freely if I remove myself as a performer. I'm planning a re-staging of this performance, and I will not perform in it. 

The Fall
2012
Marilyn mimicry duet/ burlesque

OPP: Can you talk more specifically about The Fall and explain the performance to our readers?

SH: The Fall is the kind of work I imagine myself doing more of, and it's probably the most emblematic of how my mind works creatively. There is a lot going on in this performance. I wanted to create a performance collage, with cultural, historical, and personal symbols and themes butting up against each other. The Fall is a theatrical spectacle that takes place in a restaurant/lounge, that puts the viewer in the position of guest/consumer. They are consuming the spectacle, all the costumes and dancing bodies, along with cocktails. The photographers are performing as much as the chorus girls, and the "star" is a lip-syncing Marilyn Monroe mimic. In this setting, the iconic Marilyn Monroe becomes Eve in the garden. She's a temptress and culturally understood as a sexual being and—maybe as a result—a tragic figure.

The performance had three main parts. First, viewers were greeted by servers wearing feathers. They were staring, stomping, hissing, and passing out pomegranate drinks. After everyone was served, the chorus line of servers performed the second part: the champagne parade, in which they held bottles above their heads as they did an aggressive song and dance number. While this was happening, a Tree of Knowledge was juggling pomegranates. The two Marilyn Monroe figures were frozen, coming to life every once in a while to do a little shimmy and sing a bit. The paparazzi were mirroring the chorus line, snapping pictures of the chorus and the audience. The third section was the musical mimicry. One of the two Marilyns sang a mash-up of the "Diamonds" number with Nicki Manaj's "Super Bass" while the other Marilyn lip-synced. All the while, the chorus line  was chiming in, and the paparazzi were snapping pictures. The mimicry/ lip sync became a burlesque with the second Marilyn taking off the iconic costume piece by piece, throwing it to the chorus, and finally slinking off the stage to join the hissing chorus line. 

The next time I do this, I plan on having more Marilyns, maybe interacting with video projections, and I would like to make the environment more specific, getting the details just right. It was a huge production for me at the time, and I tested the limits of what I could do with the resources I had. I learned a lot, and now that I've already made all the costumes, written a script, and have had the experience of performing it, I can think about improving the rest of the work. I want it to be a surreal experience that takes place in a working bar that has been transformed into a pop culture Eden.  
 

Chair Dance II
2012

OPP:  Chair Dance II references  stripping, in general, and Flashdance, specifically—at least to someone who grew up in the 80s. You start by simply performing standard sexualized gestures that we all recognize from movies about strippers, and perhaps real strippers. But that mimicry quickly becomes a struggle.

 

SH: That film was definitely in my mind, as well as the "Mein Herr" number from Cabaret. Also, when I was researching burlesque performances for The Fall, I noticed the chair reoccurring as a prop. It's definitely a sexualized prop, and you expect the female performer to behave a certain way with it. The dance is metaphorical, with the chair as a stand-in for the male viewer's body. In the dancer's interactions with the chair, there's a metaphor for an idealized sexual relationship or encounter. The woman is performing for the pleasure of the man, moving in ways that are objectifying her and making her physically vulnerable. Certainly, it's fun and possible to do these dances for one's own pleasure, but I'm not sure everyone doing or watching a chair dance is cognizant of the implications of it. 

 

I also researched chair dances via YouTube tutorials and found the whole thing a bit absurd. In one video a woman is counting off seductive gestures in eight counts, like "and rub his thigh, six seven eight." It seemed so crazy, this choreographed sexuality. I wondered what was being left out. In working with the chair, I realized how limited the motion is for the performer, and thus, how limited the metaphorical relationship is. I was also researching other more violent dance forms, like the turn-of-the century Parisian apache (AH-PAHSH), where a woman is dragged, thrown, and strangled in a dramatized street fight between her and two or more men—usually, she's playing a prostitute, and the men are her pimp and her client. I wanted to explore the kind of danger a woman can experience if she presents herself in such a practiced, sexualized manner, and how far from ideal the relationships she gets into could be. 

 

OPP: What was it like to make this video? Did your personal experience mirror the metaphor? 

 

SH: Making this video required a great deal of training and rest. For about three weeks, I practiced prop falls and stage fighting moves with a mat every other day. On the days in between, I would go to the gym and focus on my core and flexibility. The shooting of the video took two days. The first day, I didn't get the framing right, yet I performed my whole routine several times full out anyway, foolishly exhausting myself. I got caught up in the performance, and forgot that it had to read on video and that I may need to save some energy to shoot it again. On the second day of shooting, I got the framing right, choosing a tighter shot that showed the camera in the mirrors. I performed several times. Finally on the last few takes, I had the right amount of abandon in the falls and had a good sense of improvisation—even though, by then, I had my routine down. Somewhere toward the end, my right shoulder began to hurt, probably from falling on it for two days. It got really tight and I lost some feeling in my hand. I had to sleep sitting up for two weeks, taking nightly Epsom salt baths to relax enough to sleep.


Chair Dance II was also an emotionally challenging piece to make. I'm a survivor of domestic violence; nine years ago I was attacked by an ex-boyfriend. The situations I was putting myself into with the chair definitely paralleled my attack. I never intended it to be a re-enactment or strictly autobiographical—until I saw the footage, I didn't realize how powerful the connections were. Even though I am no longer at the mercy of that experience—I've had time, therapy, and a wonderful husband to help me heal—I need to acknowledge my history when it appears in my work, and I need to be kind to myself in my process. In this piece, I did everything I could to make sure I was always in control, even when it looks like I'm not, and that allowed me to wholeheartedly explore the chair as a prop and a violent metaphor without being overcome by my own personal history. 

Put a Ring on It
2010
Digital Video

OPP: Your stop motion animations Put a Ring on It (2010) and Candyman (2011) explore the representation of women's bodies in contemporary music videos and are set to the pop songs by Beyonce and Christina Aguilera which give them their titles.  Why did you choose stop motion instead of live performance for these pieces?

 

SH: This is a great question. In these works, I was very interested in the way that stop-action animation in particular depicts an illusion of motion and how each frame is mediated by an outside force. In other words, the paper legs I use in Put a Ring On It cannot move themselves, and must be arranged very carefully in every frame. I see this level of mediation in all our pop culture images, from stylists, makeup artists, editors, Photoshop, and social norms—every image we see is carefully composed, every movement is carefully choreographed. It's an unnatural, artificial presentation, and I felt animation as a process expressed these conceptual concerns. In Candyman, animation allows me to create the illusion that I am a blond, a redhead and a brunette in a trio, dancing with a sailor's outfit on, none of which are true outside Photoshop and sequential imagery. I liked how false the image is, and how weird and jerky the animated movements are.

 

I could also dismember the body in Put a Ring On It, which would be harder to do in performance! I also like the flatness of cut paper and the composite digital image. It reminds me of paper dolls and makes the animations feel a bit playful and childlike, which emphasizes the fact that young girls model behavior from these videos. There are hundreds of videos posted to YouTube with girls mimicking Beyonce. Making my own frame by frame imitation of that video felt like the most absurdly devoted way to re-create it, using the most simple and helpless materials.

 

OPP: Post-feminism is a term I hear as often as post-racial, and I'm shocked that anyone thinks we are post-anything. Why is it still important to be making work about the representation of women's bodies, roles, and movements in art and pop culture?

 

SH: I'm so glad you asked this! I was lucky to work with the wonderfully feminist-friendly Mark Newport in graduate school. He is a great supporter of my work, and since he responds to cultural gender norms directly in his own work (re-imagining hyper-masculine superheros and football players), he is engaged with the issues I'm dealing with and gave me a lot of thoughtful feedback. Unfortunately, I've also experienced quite the opposite male perspective as well. Recently, a few male artists and academics have reacted to my mimetic performances as simply seductive acts, adding to all the other images of women being seductive. They refused to engage with the feminist discussion that is the content of my work, could not acknowledge that I was challenging the male gaze by photographing and video taping myself, and didn't seem to understand the decades of female self-portraiture, body art and performance art that I am in dialog with. They acted as if there was no need for this. One even said to me, "There have already been like, four or five waves of Feminism." This floored me! He displayed his devastating lack of knowledge and dismissed my work in one fell swoop. This kind of ignorance of Feminism at the highest levels of artistic production and discourse proved to me that it is important to continue making this work, and that it is important for all women to continue to cast a critical eye toward the culture they consume and the messages they are receiving. 

 

Certainly, Feminism has evolved. After all, I can call myself a feminist and still wear bras and shave my legs. But I agree with you that terms like post-feminism are premature, and worse could be part of a movement toward what author Susan Douglas calls "enlightened sexism." We're in a strong backlash, and there are daily reminders of this that reassure me that I need to keep making work. It's 2012, and being a woman is still fraught with demands on our bodies and roles. I walk down the street, and a stranger demands I smile. I see an ad with a close up of a woman's wet lips putting something in her mouth. I hear of another state threatening to take reproductive rights away from women. I see another Judd Apatow comedy using pussy, having a vagina, or being gay as the worst-possible, "hilarious" insult one man can hurl at another man. I hear about the struggles of women to give birth on their own terms: without lying down, without an unnecessary C-section, without being rushed to labor by an impatient doctor.

 

It's dangerous to be a woman in this culture, and if we're not careful, we will all believe our greatest value is how we look, how we move, and how well we can please others. Through my work, I aim to expose these dangers, to reveal the absurdities of what culture expects of us, and to imagine new possibilities for expression.

 

As long as Kelly Ripa is on TV  in her skinny jeans, breezing through 1950s housewife duties without a man in sight and telling me how I can be "even more amazing" with a new kitchen appliance, I have more work to do.

 

To view more of Sara's work, please visit http://saramholwerda.com.