“…rather than reiterating these narratives throughout history of what makes women ‘women,’ or what makes women monstrous, I think women should be the ones to decide and to retell those narratives.”
Think of your favorite werewolf. Are you a traditionalist watching American Werewolf in London? Maybe your high school years were filled with Team Jacob debates or MTV made you a Scott McCall fan. Regardless, think about what all these representations have in common. What would these look like if the main monsters were women?
This is what new South Carolinian, artist Marina Shaltout, asks in her installation Bad Bitch. Told best in her own words, this installation is a “meta-camp, multi-channel video installation that tells the story of a female werewolf exhibiting three symptoms of PMS (Ravenous, Reckless, and Raging).”
A female werewolf being new or surprising is inherently ironic—women are no strangers to being portrayed as monsters. However, the feminine monster is typically just that: feminine. Think Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy or Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique; even in a non-human form they remain feminine, complete with sexual organs and rife with sensuality.
If women are ever portrayed as fur-covered monsters, they are rarely allowed to be seen as women, losing all sense of femininity. This is the dichotomous relationship of the female monster, either too feminine or not feminine at all.
Shaltout relates this in part to the experience of women portrayed by the media, saying, “It's this really interesting process where we women have this notion of, ‘I want to be this woman, but society hates this woman and deems her crazy or problematic or undesirable, so I also hate this woman and therefore I hate myself.’”
With her own body, Shaltout resists this patriarchal narrative that defines the feminine by its standards. In these installation videos, she dons a full-body wolf costume and dresses it up with wigs, jewelry, and nails. She refuses to let the monster lose its femininity and refuses to let that femininity be comfortable.
“I explore mythologies of females throughout history and the way that we conflate femininity with evil and societal problems. I specifically consider how female monsters are sexualized while male monsters are bad-ass grotesque figures, and I'm interested in flipping those gender notions of what a monster has to be,” Shaltout reveals, “But rather than reiterating these narratives throughout history of what makes women ‘women,’ or what makes women monstrous, I think women should be the ones to decide and to retell those narratives.”
This narrative consists of three videos, featured on three individual, decorated TVs. Each video presents the main character—Shaltout in costume—in three action sequences: in one, she is eating cakes messily, surrounded by purple fur and the moon that beckons her; in the second, she is putting on makeup at a light blue vanity with its shattered pieces creating the frame itself; and in the third, she is dancing, moving with glitter and framed by the oxymoronic exotic yet inherently natural foliage. All three parts of this installation coalesce at a peak wherein the character at their center stops existing to please the watcher.
All the materials seen in the videos and on their frames are either handmade or personally sourced by Shaltout. The vanity was found, while the pieces on the frame were created to simply look like the broken furniture in the video. The cake fixtures actually came first with the pastries in the video baked by Shaltout to match. These “moments of artifice,” as she calls them, are key to her work and bridge the faux with authenticity.
Learning what to create and what to reuse is key to ensuring her process moves along seamlessly, and Shaltout’s varied artistic background surely helps. Though born in Missouri, she grew up in Illinois where she went to college and received her BFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing before doing a residency at New Mexico State University and finally becoming an MFA candidate in 3D and Extended Medium at the University of Arizona.
Her work with 3D sculpture aids in hands on work, like wrapping violet fur or placing robin egg blue wood on a TV frame. Her work creating appendages supports her visual eye, seen in the careful cultivation of wardrobe or recreation of baked goods. And her work with body-based installation and performance allows her to blur the line between self and other.
“Visuals is my favorite part. It's me saying does this glittery dress work for this? It's a gathering of materials and then kind of playing around to see what will work, and a lot goes into it,” she intimates, “I think I debated about the color of the wig for two weeks straight. These little things—they're arbitrary and yet hold so much weight—and at the end of the day, I get to make those decisions myself, which is really cool.”
Video installation adds a fresh layer to performance in this ability to shift visuals and have multiple takes and edits. There are never many cuts, but Shaltout is able to play with lighting and color, even recreating sound. There always is an organic element, however, to what happens when the camera is turned on, and some things, like breaking the vanity, can only happen once.
“I do script; I storyboard. But I'm more of a writer, so I'll write out the sequence of actions that I plan to take in my videos. And I kind of have that as like a blueprint, but a lot of times my work is improv,” Shaltout describes, “I set myself up with my props and with the general idea, but a lot of it is just kind of going with the feeling in the moment.”
Donning these costumes and props both makes Shaltout appear as if she could be anybody and specifically embodies a particular part of femininity and perception of the feminine. What at first glance could appear as a strange, silly Halloween costume is a rumination on the very control of women’s bodies and personas, and by turning our expectations of both storytelling and genre on their head, Shaltout is able to reclaim the monstrous feminine.
In the future, Shaltout aims to continue these stories in different, yet perpetually linked, personas. Her current idea involves mimicry, flowers, and phallic-shaped foods, but that’s your sneak peek for now. Regardless, she will continue to assert that if you’re going to represent me as a monster, I’m going to make you look at me as the “monster” I truly am. It is her, and our, narrative now.
So—why are there no woman werewolves? They make people in a patriarchal world uncomfortable. They represent a breaking of boundaries and a power that makes people scared. But they should be. And we, as women, should be comfortable and proud of our power, fur and claws included.
Bad Bitch is currently on display at 701 Whaley’s Center for Contemporary Art as part of their “Biennial Part 1,” which is up until November 14th. Read more about the Biennial here:
Shaltout now resides in Hartsville, South Carolina, teaching at Coker University as a Visiting Assistant Professor. You can follow her journey at her website.
-Christina Xan
