EYE MOTIFS

In my work I have been using a lot of eye motifs - as this links to the fact that women are not percieved as seers, they are there to be seen. By drawing focus to the eyes, or using eyes in a way that is totally uncomfortable and disruptive it reflects the gaze back onto the viewer, rather than allowing the viewer to scrutinise the subject.

These quotes from "The Explicit Body In Performance" by Rebecca Schneider address sight as it is featured in media, and how artists (particularly female ones) have realised this and been able to subvert the male gaze and present themselves as a sexual subject within their own work.

"if "seeing through" is the etymological root of perspective then seeing back through implies a mostmodern turn on that perspectivalism, a doubling back over uniocular vision, so see, " p.126

By using eyes in unfamiliar places, sometimes subtle sometimes not it gives the implication of the image looking back in a more active manner than is expected of a drawing / photogaph / image of a woman.

"redressing a space structured to render being seen and being blind identical, to render bearing vision and being dislocated (invisible to the seen) synonymous" p.126

"In making her split explicit for purposes of explication, the explicit body performer invokes her historic delimination at the same time that she attempts to redress it as "seer", showing the show.  p.126/7

I have put the artist, Penny Slinger on my blog previously but I found what she said incredibly relevent to my work.

This piece "`Consider the Lillies" and "ICU, Eye Sea U, I see you" both use an eye to cover the artists genitalia, disrupting the flow of what could otherwise be a fairly standard photograph. The eye is led there as well as it's the most densely packed area of the image. The series of pieces that this comes from goes through the different 'stereotypes' that women are held under (virgin, wife, mother, lover etc)

"By putting myself in the position of both the viewer and the viewed, I confounded the old subject-object dynamic and became the subject of my own art, my own sexual identity, not just an effect, not objectified through the eye of the male perceiver" " Page.43

I'm unsure how something like this translates through illustration but it is the feeling of imbuing the work with sexual agency, or something that does not allow the viewer to be in control.