All posts tagged with 'mayashita maki'
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Russet Lederman received a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts, New York City in 1999 and is currently pursuing her M.A/Ph.D track in Media Studies at The New School University, NYC. Recently, she collaborated on conferences, media art events and screenings for MediaModes, Javamuseum, Franklin Furnace Archives and the X/Fest Experimental Video Festival. In 2001-2002, she was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s New Media/New Century Award, a commission to create a fine art web work about the American landscape for the museum’s web site. She has exhibited her CD-ROM, DVD and web art works at Prix Ars Electronica (where she received an Honorary Mention), Lab 01, Cast 01, The Digital Salon, Interstanding3, Neovideo International Video Festival, ISEA 2000, Sonar 2000 and 2002, European Media Art Festival 2000, Rotterdam Architectuur Film Festival, Brussels 2000, 4th Graz Biennial on Media and Architecture, File New Media Festival (second place award), Mediaterra, 15. Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival, Docs-Online 2001, Verbindingen-Jonctions4 and Remote Lounge, NYC, 2002.
Recent writings and reproductions about her work have appeared in Leonardo, The New York Times, Die Welt (Berlin) Circa, and How Magazine (in which she received a Merit Award for Interactive Design). Her work is in the collection of The Swiss Federal Office of Culture, the Rhizome Artbase, and the Smithsonian American Art. She has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn, Parsons School of Design, NYC, and is currently a faculty member and was the Academic Advisor for the MFA Computer at the School of Visual Arts
“Shojo” and the Art of Resistance by Contemporary Japanese Women Photographers and Media Artists.
In this essay, I argue that the staged “cos-play” (costume play) inspired works of contemporary Japanese women photographers and media artists employ the trappings of “kawaii” (cute) and “shojo” (girl) culture as a feminist strategy to exploit traditional gender stereotypes and gain a measure of personal freedom in the restrictive context of Japanese culture. By combining critical theories about the primarily subversive origins of “cute culture” within the 1960/1970s Japanese resistance movements with examples of sex and dissent portrayed in the works of Japanese male photographers such as Yoshiyuki Kohei, Watanabe Katsumi and Araki, an historical support can be found for the highly sexualized masquerades now practiced by contemporary photographers Yanagi MIwa, Sawada Tomoko and Suzuki Ryoko, and performance artist Norico (Sunayama Noriko). It is at the intersection of an inversion of kawaii shojo culture with the above mentioned historical precedence for sex as dissent that I analyze the distinctive type of agency enacted by women media artists over the past 15 years – one that explores a liminal and hybrid-gendered space that mixes subversion and consumerism.