Rachel Rivette 2018-2019

Rachel Rivette Thesis Statement

This body of work is intended to address society’s shift in viewing the female nude and to reposition the gaze by reframing sexuality, defining my own viewer, and allowing my work to become an artistic subject that is based around power and intention through working out of a post-feminist dogma.

There is a longstanding history in art of the idealized/fanaticized nude, yet they are now considered shameful/inappropriate/embarrassing. The opinion of the nude didn’t change until women started turning their naked bodies into art on their own, removing the intentional idea of the male spectator’s voyeurism in their nakedness, that a male-dominated society decided that nudes were destroying moral compasses everywhere.

Over the course of the past year, I have collected “lewd” photographs, taken by the subject herself, that has received backlash, offensive commentary, has been reported by men or removed by social media regulators, and then turn those photographs into screen prints with the intention of using the mass production that screen printing offers to address the mass consumption of female nudity as well as the constantly growing demand for nudity and sexualization of women, to the point that finer details and the ability to define the subject as a person don’t matter, while at the same time using these layers as a nod toward the “layers” of a woman and her sexuality; if a layer of the print is removed, the woman won’t come to form.

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