Shown in Living Art's of Tulsa Prospectus Exhibition from March 6th to March 19th.  

My photographs address the unfair paradox which society imposes by categorizing women as only a whore or a madonna. Growing up Catholic in the 2000s I find the teachings of the church and the influence of the media mix together toxically. Through the church it seemed purity, modesty, and submissiveness to authority were what to mold to as a girl. On the popular culture side promiscuity, sexuality, and rebellion was shown by women in the media more than it ever had before. The ‘it girls’ I would see on television into the 2010s, had these features; and was I, a girl to be like them? It would seem the options were to be divine or an object; neither seemed of my own.

Drawing inspiration from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, my photographs explore the suppression of women and their revolutions from the second wave of feminism to the present. This novel is what inspired me to take aesthetic inspiration from the advertisements and fashions of the time leading up to the second wave, the 1950s, and early 60s. The advertising sometimes makes me think that we really haven’t changed that much at all. This project then shows pieces from decades leading from then and into the present. It is by tracing back and forth through this time that this project aims to question the suppression of women through time. I seek for the viewer to critique; where we have changed, where we haven’t, and where we need to continue improvement as a society. 

 I use flowers to not only help my work be cohesive aesthetically but to subtly reference language to do with sexuality. For example; the term ‘deflowering' for when a woman has lost her virginity. I want my work to confront these terms that suppress women, and then challenge them. Sometimes the confronting and challenging is to happen in one image, and other times it is meant to be seen in the project as a whole. This project positions itself as a criticism of those who wish to return to the past and regress the rights of women. These photographs serve to caution that there is no greatness to be found in the past. This project helps to make aware there is genuinely a third (and maybe now a fourth) wave of feminism and most definitely a need for it.