By Emily Moffitt
One of our interns with the Jasper Project, Stephanie Allen, has put together her undergraduate honors solo exhibition on UofSC campus!
Her exhibition, titled “In My Skin, Her Skin” is a culmination of works and themes from her undergraduate years in combination with her experiences and the experiences of other women and nonbinary individuals. The works called for plenty of experimentation, incorporating new surfaces to work on like acetate and media like graphite powder. Experimentation was crucial for the large-scale pieces to work as the use of acetate added the layering effect that Allen needed for her messages to shine through the portraits.
“I wanted two separate spaces for different facets of identity,” Allen states. “I finger painted, used India ink, and had a lot of flexibility with materials. It was also my first time working on such a large scale and working on each corner of the page was definitely a challenge.”
The exhibition calls back and converses with previous works by Allen as the perception of the body-most often female-through the lens of the church or more conservative ideations has always been something Allen critiqued. Now, “In My Skin, Her Skin” highlights the feelings of others through layering of abstracted mark making and fine-tuned, anonymized representations of the interviewees.
For this particular series, the interview process was completely integral to the work,” Allen states. “The work was wholly dependent on how that person expressed their relationship with their body.” Each of the larger-than-life portraits have two layers; the first graphite layer is based on a photograph provided by each of the interviewees, with the freedom of posing and positioning completely in their hands. The project captures not only the freedom that these interviewees feel in regard to their bodies but is indicative of how they wish to present themselves to the world. The interview process takes on a grander meaning with the second, abstracted layer as Allen listened carefully to the answers of her subjects in order to provide inspiration for color palettes and the style of mark making that she would opt for on that particular person’s portrait.
Allen’s mission for her exhibition lies within creating and portraying a wider visual vocabulary of what can be considered feminine. “The point of the show is to show that a body does not dictate identity. The pieces share commonalities of queerness and femininity, and those things don’t have a specific aesthetic.”
By creating works of art with a variety of body shapes and posing, they force us to question what our predilections of femininity include, questioning the heteronormativity of gender roles. Allen notes that we as humans are often predisposed to associating looks with the character of an individual, causing our perception of femininity to often lie within physical attributes rather than mentality or emotion. Through the grand scale of the models and universal theme of questioning what we perceive as a feminine individual, Allen hopes to evoke self-reflection in the audiences as we view her work, letting ourselves reevaluate how we see femininity out of the liminal scheme of exclusively womanhood.
Viewers of Allen’s past work definitely see that the connecting threads between her existing body of work, and the passion she harbors for this exhibition is clear.
“In My Skin, Her Skin” is on display in McMaster College’s Passage Gallery on the first floor through May 14th. A reception will be hosted at 6 PM on May 5, and some of Allen’s earlier but relevant work is also still up on display in Cool Beans! across from Wardlaw College.