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Artist
Statement My body of work alludes to Communist propaganda posters and American pin-up posters of the same era. Using women as the central subject matter, the paintings refer to the phenomena of the sex trade coming out of the former Soviet Bloc countries after the shift to free market economies. I paint women in stilted, doll-like postures gazing at the viewer in defiance or absurd resignation. This subject matter is expressed through a purposeful tension between elements of Realism, Socialist Realism, Grotesque and Czech-style wry humour. My art is also informed by my birth in the former Czechoslovakia and my family's experience as part of the Czech-Slovak diaspora during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The iconography I use in my paintings is how I bear witness to the world; its history and current domination by militarism and global capital. The women depicted in my paintings allude to the naive simplicity of Cold War era posters which glorified war and their respective super powers. However, my paintings tell a different story, one made complex by the dissolution of Communism and the supremacy of one remaining superpower. The women I paint are women displaced by the new "democracies" which were intended to free them from their ideological binds of communism. They negotiate their way in a free market system which no longer automatically provides for them economically. There is a dichotomy in my paintings, where the women, once subjects of the Communist state apparatus and its repression of sexuality, are now part of the free market sexualization of women. In my work I wish to subvert the original intentions of these classic war-era illustrations. Rather than promoting or advocating war, I want to make the connection between gender, militarism, and globalization and expose both the desperate and creative ways in which women survive inside this context. miriam bohemia |
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Woman's
Kapital This series, Woman's Kapital, was created out of my continued concern and interest with my culture. I was born in the former Czechoslovakia, of both Czech and Slovak parents, and was part of the Czech-Slovak diaspora during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Having been uprooted from my culture I continue to be fascinated with their rich cultural traditions as well as with the political landscape, both before and after the fall of communism. As a woman brought up on Western feminism, I interject my observations of the Czech and Slovak Republics' rapid move towards a globalized economy with a particular interest in what roles women assume to survive the disintegration of the former communist system. A point of departure for my work is looking at the phenomena of the explosion of the sex trade in former Eastern block countries. The communist state apparatus and its repression of sexuality has been replaced with the free market sexualization of women. Slavic women are now sought after as commodities by westerners when previously under communism they were de-sexualized and perceived as undesirable by the Western world. Along which political boundary do we place women's authentic sexual desire? How can Slavic women, of which I am one, explore their own sexual desires (as explicitly as they choose)? The women in my paintings in their stilted, garish, doll like postures gaze at the viewer in defiance, or sit in obvious boredom. The paintings show a purposeful play between flatness and fleshiness. The faces are mask-like and plastic. The figures dominate the foreground of the canvas, the background which is not set in a 'realistic space', dwarfs in comparison to the figure; playing with a very Czech sense of 'irony' in art. While the political elements and symbolism are a reference to Czech (and Czechoslovak) culture and history, the compositional elements reference the flatness and patterning of Slovak folk art. The interplay of these various elements, symbolic, historical, political and explicitly sexual, show the viewer how all these elements coexist today both within the Czech and Slovak republics, and for me as an immigrant. miriam bohemia |
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