In “Exhibition: Public Female #1”, Eurydice combines the ancient craft of embroidery, drawing, authentic vintage film posters and photographs with the aim to bridge high and low aesthetics as well as literary and pop cultural icons and archetypes in an ecstatic exuberance of satire and parody, and into a radically inclusive visual poem in progress.
In late capitalism it is nearly impossible to sustain authentic feelings of rebellion, protest, rage, or terror--whether in response to widespread war and localized massacre or to social inequalities and the environmental crisis; the 24-hour-a-day entertainment media machine absorbs hard news and private emotions alike and regurgitates them into an indiscriminate visual feed. Mass consumption requires the lowest common denominator of accessibility in theme and composition. Movie-stars are potent tools of the worldwide advertising industry that highlights Western heroism and power. Stars become emblems of sexual availability, individual freedom and potentiality—and in the process become objectified. I undermine this unapologetic commercialism designed to maximize its single-minded effect on a stupefied audience by using the delicacy, intimacy, domesticity, pre-capitalist simplicity and solitude of the hand-stitching. It creates a ying-yang balance between content and medium. The hand-stitch softens the most provocative images, makes them seem homemade, because it is outside the public domain (it’s what forgotten old ladies and girls in sweatshops do). The hand-stitch displaces the loud, mechanical, social-realist, totalitarian imagery of pop culture, satirizes its consumerist, propagandist intentions, and adds layered depth to the flatness of global entertainment. The hand-stitch stops time. It alludes to the wise woman outside the system, the nurturing female who slips the grid, Penelope in her bedroom weaving her shroud by day & unweaving it by night to postpone her loud barbarian suitors at the palace gate. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan warned long ago about TV culture, then my medium is not a temporal longing for fulfillment. It is a state of continuous arousal, a ceaseless renewal of desire. It is a meditation ritual that shortcircuits the limitations of time, society, death. In my work, I use real bodies as muses to express intimate truths. The female nude motors my imagination. On a metaphoric level, I believe history happens on the bodies of women as lovers, citizens, mothers. On an aesthetic level, I am singularly committed to the age-old equation between the bodies we look at and the marks we make to capture them.

Eurydice