Kati Toivanen: Precious Pink from Embrasure Series

Artist(s):

• Kati Toivanen

Title:

Precious Pink from Embrasure Series

Exhibition:

• SIGGRAPH 1998: Touchware

Creation Year:

1993

Medium:

Digital Ilfochrome Print

Size:

11" x 14"

Category:

• 2D & Wall-Hung

Artist Statement:

In these sensuous images, I embrace the body with curiosity as nightmarish visions, physical recollections, and fantasies inform the perception of myself. In close-up, my body emerges as mysterious and alien, yet familiar and intimate. Horror and pleasure, the fruits of my imagination, incessantly merge and dissolve.

This series examines the possibilities and the uncomfortable qualities of female sexuality. The individual titles for the images emerged from names of cosmetic products such as lipstick and rouge, which publicly manifest our desire to be desired.

Embrasure is an architectural term for the recess of an opening in a door or a window and refers to this space in-between. Much like the orifices in the human body, these vulnerable spaces represent neither the inside nor the outside. They are both public and private, as they simultaneously reveal and conceal.