CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.- The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia presents a new exhibition featuring artists that utilize portraiture, satire, pop culture references and advertising techniques to critique and combat essentializing representations of feminine identities. Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography, on view Aug. 27-Dec. 31, features ten recently acquired photographs by contemporary artists Martine Gutierrez, Sarah Maple, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero and Tokie Rome-Taylor, with additional loaned works. The artists’ inclusion of heirlooms, regalia and toys placed in meticulously constructed scenes highlights the role that objects and representation play in shaping our intersectional identities.
"Harnessing the medium of photography and drawing on a wide range of visual methods, Romero, Gutierrez, Maple, Red Star and Rome-Taylor counter erasure and underrepresentation and take an active stance with fresh, poignant and powerful representations of themselves and their communities," said the exhibition curators, Hannah Cattarin, Adriana Greci Green and Laura Minton. “These photographs reference dominant narratives that have been articulated in visual culture over time, from Renaissance portraiture, Disney princesses, store window displays, to children's dolls and fashion mannequins.”
Brooklyn-based performance artist Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) uses consumer objects, such as mannequins, dolls and magazines, to create elaborate self-portraits that investigate her personal and collective identities. In Line Up 3 from the series Line Up (2014), Gutierrez stages a group of mannequins in matching clothing and hairstyles, and places herself among them.
The mannequins are ambiguous characters representing physical ideals promoted through capitalistic systems. Gutierrez blurs the line between “real” and “fake” and challenges Western archetypes of beauty, womanhood and femininity, and the ways limited binary constructions of femme identity are commercialized.
British visual artist Sarah Maple (b. 1985) utilizes tongue-in-cheek humor and satire to challenge traditional assumptions about religion, identity and gender, and frequently employs herself as the primary subject through which to convey her message. As in Sleeping Beauty Performs an Operation and Snow White the Scientist from the Disney Princess series (2011), Maple challenges the limits of archetypal storytelling and plays with the ubiquity and saturation of Disney’s commercial reach by casting herself as the well-known characters working as doctors, scientists, CEOs and coaches. By depicting princesses engaging in labor outside of traditional domestic spaces, Maple tackles harmful patriarchal representations of femininity that continue to be reinforced and commodified.
Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star (b. 1981) confronts popular and enduring notions of Native disappearance with humor, color, materiality and the layered complexity of historical memory. Dressed in regalia—an elk tooth dress and beaded accessories—that honors her family and community, she presents her truth as a contemporary Apsáalooke woman. In Apsáalooke Feminist #4, Red Star and her daughter Beatrice sit on a couch, floating in the joyful vibrancy and brilliance of the reds, blues, pinks, purples and yellows that are canonical of Apsáalooke aesthetics. This picture is an homage to the matrilineal order of traditional Apsáalooke society and embodies the intergenerational ways that cultural and familial values are passed on.
Cara Romero (b. 1977), a citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe of California, uses techniques of commercial and fashion photography to critique common stereotypes of Native women, reclaim the contemporary modernity of Native peoples and their worldviews and address issues of urgent importance to Indigenous communities. Romero’s Naomi (2017), Julia (2018) and Amber Morningstar (2019), from her ongoing First American Girl series, are a response to the lack of accurate and respectful representations of Native peoples in children’s toys. Confidently dressed in their own regalia and accessorized with cultural items cherished in their communities, Naomi (Northern Chumash), Amber (Choctaw) and Julia (Cochiti Pueblo) look directly at us in these powerful images. Romero references the locations of these women’s Tribal Nations while firmly anchoring them in the contemporary present.
Atlanta-based photographer Tokie Rome-Taylor (b. 1977) constructs lavish portrait scenes, melding the compositions and styles of European wealth and status with elements of African diasporic material culture. Through her ethnographic and historical research, Rome-Taylor investigates the symbolic meaning of objects, spirituality, family and memory. In Ancestors Whisper...Soft as Cotton (2020), Self-Reflection (2018) and Promising Sight (2022), Rome-Taylor reclaims, reimagines and celebrates an alternative past. The photographs defy the erasure of people of color depicted in art and their inaccurate or subjugated portrayal. The children in her photographs exude ancestral knowledge, wisdom, power and beauty, representing the interwoven connections between past, present and future.
