GIRLY GIRL MEDIA

I’ve always been inspired by hyper feminine aesthetics in visual culture – vintage fashion advertisements, movie stills, beauty campaigns and fashion dolls. These pieces of media have historically functioned as prescriptive ideals, viewed through the male gaze or presented as models of behavior to femme people under cisheteropatriarchy. But what happens when we remove hyper femininity from this context? When femininity is no longer defined simply as the opposite of masculinity, what does it become?

This body of work proposes that femininity – particularly, but not limited to, queer and lesbian femininity – is a cyclical act of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. It’s a confrontation and an exercise of imagination. Rather than rejecting femininity outright or embracing it uncritically, these works seek a joyful, self-determined femininity that is a vibrant, expansive universe with its own internal logic.

This body of work is divided into two interconnected parts: reconstructed femininity and deconstructed femininity. 

The reconstructed pieces are built from vintage fashion ads, movie stills and other “girly-girl” cultural ephemera that I have collected over my creative career. I begin by superimposing the outlines of multiple source imagery onto canvas, cardboard or wood. Through multiple intuitive painting sessions, I transform the overlapping forms using acrylic paint, oil pastels, modeling paste and fragments of girlhood itself, like pink birthday party napkins, to create entirely new feminine forms. This process mirrors the act of assembling your own femininity from visual culture that surrounds and inundates us, while reclaiming that inheritance through joy, agency and self definition.

The deconstructed pieces are wood cut outs and custom designed frames painted in acrylic. Here, the feminine forms are isolated into fragments: arms, legs, fashion accessories and other singular motifs extracted from the reference material. These pieces represent a femininity made of bits and bolts – taking what serves you, leaving what doesn’t – and shows gender expression as a sushi conveyor belt restaurant, selecting only what delights and letting the rest motor forward.

This work challenges the conflation of femininity as part of a dichotomous aspect of human behavior. Instead, we see it as its own vibrant supernova of expression. It’s excessive. It’s playful. It’s constantly becoming. As an artist most fulfilled within a world of colorful femininity, this work is an extension of the hand to the audience, asking them to dismantle inherited ideas of femininity, reconstruct them on their own terms, and perhaps, rediscover their inner diva.

GIRLY GIRL 01| 10×10” | Acrylic and Spray Paint on Wood Panel, Contact astone@thevendue.com for inquires