Weekly Selfies 2 - Leslie R

 

Leslie Ramirez, Bashful, 2024

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Lucille Ball), 1975

Leslie Ramirez, Safe and Sound, 2024

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1954

The Cindy Sherman Effect by Phoebe Hoban for ArtNews

1.   “By deconstructing and reinventing portraiture, which in itself was something of a dead genre when she arrived on the scene, Sherman influenced not only photographers but also painters and performance and video artists. And by limiting her subject matter strictly to herself, while at the same time excavating countless permutations, she inspired a generation of younger artists to explore their own identities across a range of mediums.”

 

• Sherman took many photos of herself dressed in clothes from different times or painting herself in bizarre ways. I don’t look at a lot of photo art, but I think the methods she uses are creative and strange at the same time.

2. "Perhaps the world’s most self-effacing artist (literally and figuratively), Sherman refuses to take any credit for her innovations. What has she herself discovered through her work? “I think it has made me realize that we’ve all chosen who we are in terms of how we want the world to see us,” she says."

• Sherman chose to show the world what kind of person she is through her work. Every photo feels like she’s a different person as she took on various characters. It shows that people are complex and there is more than meets the eye than what we see on the surface.

Ugly Beauty of Cindy Sherman

1. “In fact, her images are so foundational to feminist art criticism, to notions of the “male gaze,” that it can be difficult to see them for themselves — they come to us encrusted with theory. Sherman herself is reluctant to discuss the meaning of her work; she is amused by the interpretive frenzy it provokes.”

• When women take selfies, they make sure to get their best sides. They refuse for the world to see their vulnerability, or anything considered ugly by society's standards. Sherman’s work shows the audience that beauty cannot be without its flaws. People are not perfect and sometimes too complex to understand but that doesn’t stop us from interacting with each other.

2. “Her new mock self-portraits are of ordinary people, albeit cartoonishly caricatured. They are some of the first pure protagonists in Sherman’s work: These women are not metaphors, they are not waiting to be represented, rescued, or destroyed. They are gloriously, catastrophically themselves, and we meet them on their own terms — as we so frequently meet each other — in stagy, embarrassing, endearing selfies launched into the world.”

• Women are often seen as objects of desire and beauty in older paintings. Those women see this and think this is the only way to be represented in an art gallery or museum but people like the Guerilla Girls and Cindy Sherman worked hard to show they are more than this. To show the world they are not damsels in distress and can represent ourselves in our own terms.