MAMAISM
Domestic Readymades
Senior Thesis Project 2022BFA Integrated Design
MAMAISM is a movement “re-domestifying” iconic Dada era images into the female context of the industry.
Domestic arts - knitting, corchet, ceramics, sewing, handicrafting, decorating, even cooking and cleaning - have long been considered “low art” due to their association with women in the hom. However, these housewife tasks are bursting with vitality, utility, and love. Crocheting is a form of healing, sewing is a way to express love, and ironing your clothes becomes blissfully mundane. Instead of showing beautiful forms of textiles and crafts made with and for care, art museums include “industrial junk” and sexualized imagery from artists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali. Each artist had a kind of disguise they operated under. Marcel Duchamp dresssed as Rrose Selavy, Man Ray was just a nickname, and Salvador Dali could barely createt work consciously.
Taking on the moniker WOMAN RAY, Anna Koch reinserts the femininity of domestic arts into the fine art world with worded puns and textile mediums. To use the wwords of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the silenced woman behind the ideas of Dada, Marcel Duchamp?
More like Marcel Dushit!
Larmes de Lapin (Tears of the Bunny)
Shown at the Integrated Design x Shopify Soho pop-up, Anna showed a piece Larmes de Lapin (Tears of the Bunny). As an appropriation of Man Ray's Larmes (1932), one of his most successful photographs, Anna creates as "Woman Ray" in Larmes de Lapin. Domestic art has long been considered "low art" due to its association with women. With the mediums of crafting, Anna uses the context of iconic Dadaist artworks - largely considered to be "high art" dominated by male artists - to reinsert the female form of domestic art and domestic bliss into the fine art world. Here, the context of a childhood stuffed animal and the scrapbooking status of shadowbox frames serve as the vessel to transform Larmes into something completely different.
(This acts an extension of her thesis work MAMAISM: Domestic Readymades).
04-09-2022
