Monique Genton: Stroke
Artist(s):
Title:
- Stroke
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 1996
Medium:
- Ink and acrylic on hardboard, mounted on a 1.5" wooden frame
Size:
- 40" x 40" x 1.5"
Category:
Artist Statement:
Old illustrational photographs are digitally manipulated then richly glazed with coloured paint to suggest: skin, touch, sensuality, and emotion. Those human elements are of particular interest, not only because science’s knowledge hierarchy assigns data acquired through the mind and eye the highest credibility, and data acquired through the sensual body, the least, but also because the latter have historically been devalued as ‘feminine’ ways of knowing the world.
Together, the photos and paint create dialectic montages of human/photomechanical, soft/hard, subject/object, etc. Despite their technological mediation and their dry, didactic origin, the reified figures reveal human complexity and the transient nature of thought.
I am interested in textbook illustrations and the scientific rhetorical strategies they employ to make distant, to universalize, and to dehumanize their subjects – all in the name of objective truths. The subjects in this series are unnamed women demonstrating various swimming techniques in an old swimming manual. When I first saw these illustrations, I was struck with what they did not address: individuality, the sensual body in water, sensations of temperature, fear, etc. In response, my mixed-media work undermines the conceit of scientific representation by re-investing human qualities and individual narratives.
