MIS(S)REPRESENTATIONS:
Reimagining Women with Collage and Paint

By Karin McGinn
BFA (Distinction), Alberta College of Art + Design, 2015
A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
in
Visual Arts
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2017

© Karin McGinn, 2017

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ABSTRACT:
Collage at times refuses to be contained; it spills over the paper substrate and ruptures
the idea of kept order. This thesis examines collage as a material strategy to address
gendered mis(s)representations of women that I am confronted with in my everyday.
Acknowledging collages political agency alongside methodological research on
feminism, intertextual strategies and modes of transgression provides new
understandings as well as alternative forms to visually express being in one's body and
in the world. Writers Georges Bataille and Kathy Acker demonstrate how transgressive
tendencies evoke an outsider’s political agency using abject signification to question
systems of order and hegemonic power. My process-based art practice looks at works
of art and ideas that promote or demonstrate an affective undoing. Employing humour
invites the absurd, the dark and the grotesque to disrupt idealized notions of the
feminine. The heart of my investigation looks to push the boundaries of otherness and
bad taste in hopes of answering my central research question: Can one affect the
conventional order of things through transgressive renderings of the female form?

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

List of Illustrations

iv

Full Moon in Broad Daylight

v

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: A Place Where Women Get Made

1

Part 1 METHOD: Collage as a Material Strategy
1.1
History of Collage
1.2
Death and Creation
1.3
Constellations of Intertextuality

4
6
9
11

Part 2 METHODOLOGY: Transgressive Tendencies
2.1
The Grotesque Female Body
2.2
Transgression in Fiction

15
18
20

Part 3 AFFECTIVE UNDOING
3.1
Abjection
3.2
Undoing Systemic Power
3.3
Humour and Absurdity

22
24
24
27

Part 4 CRITICAL REFLECTION: a stick in the spokes
4.1
The Future

30
33

Works Cited
Works Consulted

35
38

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:
Fig. 1: Karin McGinn, Seaman’s Prize Catch

4

Fig. 2: Hannah Höch, Das shöne Mädchen/The Beautiful

6

Fig. 3: Wangechi Mutu, Me. I

9

Fig. 4: Karin McGinn, Dirty Laundry

11

Fig. 5: Karin McGinn, Dirty Laundry (in motion)

12

Fig. 6: Karin McGinn, In a Minute

15

Fig. 7: Karin McGinn, BLOODY HELL

22

Fig. 8: Allison Hrabluik, This Is The Way They Make Us Bend

25

Fig. 9: Karin McGinn, Mrs. PEE

27

Fig. 10: Karin McGinn, Graduate Exhibition: a stick in the spokes

30

Fig. 11: Karin McGinn, Graduate Exhibition a stick in the spokes

31

Fig. 12: Karin McGinn, The Milky Way

33

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Full Moon in Broad Daylight

A woman wakes up and rubs the sediment of old sentiment from her eyes.
Calcium destiny fragments fall onto her cheeks and spill out onto the bed sheet, another
thing to clean up she thinks and sighs.

The woman checks her to do list: go shopping for dry cleaning, open the onions,
cut the refrigerator door, change the kids, pay the laundry. Nowhere on her list does it
say how to find meaning.

Later, at the grocery store, the woman walks up the aisle and down the aisle,
aisle after aisle —up and down. The boxes quickly pile up in the cart she pushes in front
of her. She reads the label on her children’s favourite cereal box. The words are
ridiculous tongue twisters, indecipherable ingredients guaranteed to keep food ‘fresh.’

The woman suddenly stops to tune into a soft breeze tickling her saggy midriff. A
wave of paralyzing, heart-stopping anxiety washes over her —she’s not wearing any
clothes! She puts the cereal box back on the shelf, turns around on her toes and walks
out. Full moon in broad daylight.
-Karin McGinn

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
To my supervisor Dr. Randy Cutler, a sincere gratitude of thanks for your
unwavering encouragement and for your excellent council to define my inner rebel and
agent voice.
A big thank you to my mentors made and honoured along the way: Dr. Chris
Jones, thank you for your initial encouragement and leadership. To Kathleen Ritter,
thank you for illuminating the importance of laughter in my work. To Bruce Grenville,
Simon Levin, Jonathan Middleton, Laiwan, Gareth Long and Jaime Hilder a big thank
you for your guidance and engagement. To Allison Hrabluik, thanks for your excitement
and encouragement. Thank you to Dr. Kimberly Phillips, Sarah Nordean, Ingrid Koenig,
Sadira Rodrigues, Lyse Lemieux and Marina Roy— I am grateful for your support and
insightful conversations.
I’m thankful for my all women cohort Hannamari Jalovaara, Mehran ModarresSadeghi, Jennifer Ireland, Joni Taylor, Maria Tratt and Melissa Pavlovic. I will carry this
ineffable experience of friendship, critical thinking and creativity with me.
And lastly, hugs and love to Rodney and our three boys Ryder, Sloan and Cruz.
Thank you for letting me spend time inside of the boy’s locker room— it is the most fun
I’ve ever had.

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INTRODUCTION:
A Place Where Women Get Made
The source material that ends up in my artwork comes from fashion and lifestyle
magazines of this era. These magazines are gifted to me via an old friend who owns
several successful hair and beauty salons in Calgary. Over the years he has turned
being a hairdresser into a thriving enterprise. The magazines are not only part of the
décor they function as an interpretive device with which together, client and stylist
scrutinize the potential in the images. The salons are where mostly women go to
transform (or at least try) into the glossy ads of models that have obviously never
experienced a bad hair day.
Before I leave the house for my hair appointment I glance one last look in the
mirror, mousy brown and disheveled— exactly how I feel. I arrive for my appointment
and get checked in by the front desk girl. I grab a smock from her and quickly transition
in a closet-sized change room. It’s a shedding of the old me (at least I hope) as I hang
up my coat replacing it with the salons uniform, a non-descript black smock. I fasten it
around my neck to catch the parts of me I no longer want.
Once inside I sit and wait, I feast my eyes on the beehive of activity and take it all
in. A women seated at a hair station closest to me is deeply engrossed in a ritual to
stretch artifice into beauty. Her face is hidden under a mop of long dark hair, the stylist’s
busy hands alternate between detaching the old hair extensions with a replenishment of
brand new ones—straight from a plastic casing. The evidence reveals a messy pile on
the floor that transforms into black hair snakes at the ready.

It’s all so absurd I suddenly feel the need to stifle a laugh. But then wonder, why
am I here? A smile stops mid-formation as the sides of my mouth feel gravity's pull. I
bring this question back to the studio, adding it to the other questions and anxieties that

2

I am trying to sift through in the artwork. My concerns are built on how social theory
upholds fixed ideas on gender in relation to and in contrast with my own personal
experience of life lived in a female container1. Instilled with ontological knowledge— I’m
a woman2, artist, mother, lover, caregiver, urban dweller and consumer; I find these
roles to denote certain gender stereotypes. What do these narratives about women tell
us about the constructs of contemporary Western society? Especially when the existing
systems of order tell a different story about the female gender from my own ontological
knowing?
American philosopher Judith Butler theorizes gender politics and social
transformations in the face of opposing hegemonic norms. In Undoing Gender she
states: “The “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependant on
them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative
relation to them” (3). I feel akin to Butler’s analytic on social politics as I similarly
encounter disparate moments of both belonging and separateness in relation to my own
engagement within systems of order.
Butler defines predetermined constructs of gender and other minorities in
Westernized/Eurocentric thinking as a problematic hierarchal practice:
“The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race,
its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual
verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity” (2).
Considering Butler’s analysis of perceptual marginality, the body maps out and makes
visible recognizable differences while at the same time maintains its ability to conceal
other parts of ourselves from the outside world. For this reasons the body is the central
site of my investigation to encounter and interrogate notions of gender and power.
Mis(s)representations3 imagines the female body as an interpretive anchor to
1

Susan Stewart in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection writes: “The body presents the paradox of being contained and container at once”
(104).
2
Of European descent.
3
Mis(s)representations an ongoing series of collage and gouache paintings on paper.

3

both examine daily experiences through bodily knowledge and envision new female
figurations. Contemporary philosopher Rosi Braidotti describes figurations as an
alternative feminist subjectivity. In Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory Braidotti maintains: “Figurations express
materially embedded cartographies of different nomadic subjects and as such are selfreflective and not parasitic upon a metaphorization of “others4”” (11). Braidotti’s
definition of figuration recognizes a diverse human populace in relation to place and
personal identity. I feel it relevant to point to my own subjectivity as a Canadian citizen
of European dissent and acknowledge my version of ‘woman’ is likely different from
other nomadic subjects. In this series I reflect on my own embodied knowledge as it
contains sensorial insight and idiosyncratic experiences in the everyday world.

4

French philosopher Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human
Sciences, defines the colonial term of otherness to be deemed as strange, wearisome and in
opposition to the familial or categorical found within systems of ordering.

4

PART 1) METHOD: Collage as a Material Strategy

Fig. 1: Karin McGinn. Seaman’s Prize Catch, 2016. Collage and gouache on paper, 46 x 61 cm.
Photo: Ross Kelly.

In Seaman’s Prize Catch I paint a topless fishwoman bathing in an outdoor pool.
Applying cisgender subjectivity, I imagine her as the lustful centerfold and render her
body an idealized hourglass form with perfect perky tits and a tiny waist— she is the
catch, a prize and an object. Her male companion holds a fishing pole in his tiny T. rexlike hands and with them he casts his line to catch his meal (fig. 1). As I paint the
fishwoman I recall old conversations I endured as a young adult, myths about the laws
of attraction, how a woman’s body is preferred over her face. A fish head with a

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knockout figure is the prize catch indeed. I engage gender stereotypes that I am
confronted with in my own sociopolitical culture. Braidotti encourages feminist
discourse to employ the ‘sexual difference theory’ by using gender stereotypes as a
“critique of the humanistic assumptions of subjectivity in terms of rationality, selfrepresentation, homogeneity, and stability” (104). Can one trouble the male gaze by
using it?
Commercial advertisers project an idealized body image as standard inevitably
pushing the real body, which can never be perfect away from the individual self. In the
last decade, technological advancements have enabled advertising agencies to digitally
render a flawless image — the photograph of the model is ‘fixed’ to achieve an
impossible perfection or rather the image is made artificial. The female body is the
primary selling feature as an objectified body-object in commercial narratives based on
the construct of an idealized body5. Capitalist systems that engender illusions about
feminine bodies have led me to visually explore imperfect other bodies, as a way to
counter Western culture’s obsession with a feminine ideal – the desire to change body
shape, the pressure to create perfection that compromises and denies agency in a
personal identity.

5

Susan Stewart writes, “The idealized body implicitly denies the possibility of death—it attempts
to present a realm of transcendence and immortality, a realm of the classic. This is the bodymade object, and thus the body as potential commodity” (133).

6

1.1 History of Collage

Fig. 2. Removed due to copyright restrictions.

Fig. 2: Hannah Höch. Das shöne Mädchen/The Beautiful Girl, 1920. Photomontage, 35 x 29 cm.

The history of collage was born out of an unstable political climate prior to and
after WWI. Previous upheld bourgeois ideals and government trust suddenly fell into
question by the proletariat, artists, anarchists and others who sought change. A
rejection of traditional hierarchies transformed the role of the artist to define their own
modern revolution. Dadaists and later Surrealists sought out individual responses by
inventing new experimental methods of materiality through the creative unconscious
and avant-garde aesthetics. Dadaists created the technique ‘photomontage’ by recontextualizing commercial advertisements as a means to politically oppose the
hegemonic constraints of their own culture. In The Age of Collage: Contemporary
Collage in Modern Art author Silke Krohn explains the Dadaist’s thinking: “They sought
to create not art but anti-art; they wanted to destroy the image that newspapers and
magazines tried to get them to believe in; their weapons were scissors and glue” (6).
Artist Hannah Höch a member of the Berlin Dada art movement captured this nihilistic

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energy while campaigning for anti-war principles and gender equality in her
photomontages.
In Hannah Höch’s The Beautiful Girl the artist uses collage imagery to point to
and examine gender stereotypes of her time (fig. 2). Source material cut from
magazines, posters and leaflets of the 1920’s; she positions the female body in the
center forefront of the picture plane. A pair of woman’s legs aligns in similar formation to
its neighbour, a car door handle. This parallel positioning suggests that material
possession and female objectivity are viewed with equal significance. The Beautiful Girl
not only points to the hierarchal male gaze of this era, the work successfully forefronts
her voice questioning the station of women. In much of Höch’s artwork the female form
dominates the image offering a sense of the artists state of oppression as a working
class woman. Although the body is frequently depicted, it should be noted that the
female container isn’t the focus rather it is her politics that drive the work resulting in a
relative indirectness to the body itself. In comparison my art as research seeks a more
direct translation of the stories told by the body across its membrane skin, its orifices
the boundary crossing between two worlds.
Similar to Höch’s The Beautiful Girl, Seaman’s Prize Catch aims to interrogate
structures of gender presented within my own spatiotemporal experience. As mentioned
earlier, I imagine the male figure is trying to catch the fishwoman with his rod. On the
other hand, I find that image signifiers are slippery as I watch the pictures meaning slide
in and out of focus. I look again at Seaman’s Prize Catch and acknowledge that the
fishwoman's hands on hips suggest a confident awareness in her own seductive
powers. This female figure, a hybrid figuration demonstrates reciprocity to engage in this
tired dialect suggesting that instinctual animal behavior endures. Can fictional
representations of gender stereotypes deconstruct our relationships to subjectivity and
otherness?
Although Höch wasn’t the first artist to use collage as a tool of agency it is the
artist’s feminist voice heard through her use of the source material that makes her work

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groundbreaking in its historical contribution. Höch’s manipulation of photomontage
clearly defines her personal subjectivity in a male dominated arena including her own
Dadaist contemporaries. An excerpt taken from her Zer Collage exhibition catalogue in
Höch’s writing describes the technique photomontage as a strategy for artists:
“ Claiming poetic license, we add or remove letters. We give words the wrong meaning
by using them nonsensically ⎯ ‘to bare one’s heart to somebody’. Casting our scruples
aside, we ignore syntax, if that gives greater weight or colour to what we have
penned…in the visual arts it predominantly refers to a newly created entity, made from
alienating components” (16).
I enter an artwork using the materiality of collage as a tool for agency,
intertextuality and improvisation. To this I add painterly elements to heighten the
viewer’s and my own disorientation. When I first began experimenting with collage I
realized right away that this material offered new possibilities and accompanying
frustrations. A completely different approach to art making, I find myself responding to
the source materials ‘alienating components’ propagating unattainable notions to which
I am mesmerized and transfixed by the slick mirages. To mitigate its power I endeavor
to de-contextualize its original intent. By tricking the eye I look past the ads images
focusing instead on the textures and colours. In Seaman’s Prize Catch I collect
floorboard textures from various sources such as furniture/dishwasher ads to construct
a cubist inspired pool deck. I have come to view the brushstrokes made with gouache
paint as a representation of my own singular voice while the collage material signifies
and performs as the stand in for a franchised world.

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1.2 Death and Creation

In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) her character Dr. Frankenstein
exhumes old human remains, collaging skin and arteries together the protagonist brings
life into his monstrous container:
“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the
wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs
were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!ーGreat God!
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries underneath; his hair
was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances
only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the
same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion
and straight black lips” (35).
Similar to Dr. Frankenstein I am surprised by the results that have arrived from my own
making as the conjoined paint and collage materials emit a life of its own. It is this often
absurd, dark and humorous piecing together that allows me to construct new
possibilities for feeling and experiencing spaces that the body occupies.

Fig. 3. Removed due to copyright restrictions.

Fig. 3: Wangechi Mutu. Me.I, 2012. Mixed media and collage on paper, size unknown.

10

In the afterword to the book Wangechi Mutu: A Shady Promise Malik Gaines and
Alexandro Segade describe the artists mixed-media collages by way of comparison to
Shelley’s protagonist Frankenstein:
“Wangechi Mutu’s great creations—created in a vein similar to that with which Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein constructed his monster, from a variety of abject sources—are
her hybrids. At once both alien and earthy, these dancing goddesses are trans-species
pin-ups of a different sort” (145).
I discovered this excerpt after I made my own connection to Frankenstein’s abominable
creature, a coincidence that speaks to collage’s material alchemical ability to fuse
strange incongruent marriages by way of destruction. In the novel Dr. Frankenstein
pieces together decaying body parts from the dead to make his monster; by
comparison in Mutu’s and my own artistic process we slice and dismember the
stereotypes of women presented in the source material to create new female figurations.
In Sarah Thornton’s book 33 Artists in 3 Acts the author interviews Kenyan born Mutu in
her Brooklyn home and studio. The artist shows Thornton her self-described ““operating
table,” where she pieces together her complex collages” (56). Mutu proclaims, ““I am
mostly, if not always obsessed with images of women…as an African not living in my
motherland, I’m very sensitive to depictions of African people”” (56). Although Mutu’s
ethnic origin vastly differs from mine we share a similar intention to change the current
narrative of gender mis(s)representations within our respective cultures. Thornton writes,
“Mutu’s women are mysterious, jolie-laide creatures that address the politics of beauty”
(57). “Collages depicting fantastical women that look like crossbred aliens or futuristic
witch doctors covered in paint” (56). In Mutu’s mixed media collage Me. I (fig. 3) her
portrayal of the feminine transcends our earthly standards of beauty creating the
evocation of a universal other enabling the viewer to experience a different kind of
beauty, one that lives outside of a familiar subjectivity.

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1.2 Constellations of Intertextuality

Fig. 4: Karin McGinn. Dirty Laundry, 2015. Mixed media installation, 62 x 80 cm. Photo: Karin
McGinn.

Philosopher Julia Kristeva is attributed with bringing forth the term
‘intertextuality’ to conceive a pre-supposition of subjective connections in words.
Previous poststructuralist6 concepts believed literary terms to be isolated typologies
devoid of historical reference. Defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary
intertextuality is the complex interrelationship between a text and other texts taken as
basic to the creation or interpretation of the text. Collages tacit experimental nature
evokes new connections and improvisations that encourage the development of
intertextual meaning through its infinite and accidental combinations. By adapting this
language connection to imagery, I imagine and image a constellation of ideas into nonlinear configurations.
6

Linguist Ferdinard de Saussure in Structural Linguistics described literary terms as static
systems without referential subjectivity.

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Fig. 5: Karin McGinn. In motion Dirty Laundry, 2015. Mixed media installation, 62 x 80 cm. Photo:
Karin McGinn.

Prior to entering Emily Carr University’s MFA program I constructed a mixed
media site-specific installation Dirty Laundry (fig. 4,5). Looking back I see how this
particular work foregrounds my interest in generating intertextual imagery. On the
laundry line hangs a taxonomic reference to strangely familiar objects, some on paper,
others spectres of old clothing remnants. My laundry list reads:
1- half-peeled banana painted on paper
1- painted paper toilet roll
2- a pair of cloth constructed breasts w/ faux fur merkin sewn on bodysuit
2- an old pair of men’s business socks w/ DADDY ISSUES appliquéd on them w/ men’s
dress-shirt material

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I watch the items sway back and forth on the line. The wind animates the Skinsuit and
pushes her full bush forward— a perverse pussy invitation. The wind gusts back to its
previous direction and takes Skinsuit away retracting her request.

In my family of five, I am the only female in our household. A line of demarcation
exists simply by the nature of my gender; I am marked as both a spectacle and an
oddity. On the day I install Dirty Laundry the boys race through the house after school
straight into the backyard. All three of them give each other a bemused look when they
finally land their gaze on my clothesline of curiosities (Mom’s at it again, they must
think.) My youngest child immediately seizes the opportunity to grope the Skinsuit’s
breast. He does it tentatively as if he is actually touching a real breast and wears a
sheepish grin while simultaneously reaching up to this no-man's land of private body
parts. His face turns back towards me to register the implication of his seven-year-old
curiosity and boldness.

Prior to our postmodern era clotheslines functioned in partnership with archaic
washing devices to complete the chore of household laundry. Falling on the hands of
wives and daughters, this arduous task could easily dominate an entire day’s work. In
Roberta Cantow’s documentary Clotheslines7 (1981) the filmmaker recollects the history
of clotheslines with stories told by women relating they’re past connections to this
domestic object. The film establishes the importance of the clothesline as a cultural
artifact and through its usage functioned as an essential line of communication. The act
of hanging clothes outside initiated a social connectivity within suburban/urban
communities. There was also the unintended gossip translated through the reading of
the line. In the film one lady interprets a reading of her neighbours line by pointing to a
certain signifier for infidelity, surmising a black pair of panties on a clothesline could only
mean a cheating wife. The clothesline’s capacity to communicate an undisclosed
message about its owner has inspired me to investigate the subversive power in
objects/spaces with the intention to reveal the private persona.

7

You can watch Roberta Cantow’s film here: Clotheslines

14

In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art author Julia
Kristeva defines intertextuality as going beyond semantics and intersubjectivity. She
writes: “The concept of text as ideologeme determines the very procedure of a
semiotics that, by studying the text as intertextuality, considers it as such within (the
text of) society and history” (37). According to Kristeva text is always contextualized
within a societal narrativization providing additional insight and meaning to intertextual
referencing. In the visual world, the image is never just an image as it similarly
represents an unconscious societal signifier; for example the clothesline as a cultural
artifact holds an implicit understanding of its voyeuristic suggestion and audience
participation. The clothesline is understood to communicate a private message about its
owner and through its performance the clothesline conjures a temporal window into
viewing a previously public space turned private. With the conception and development
of Dirty Laundry I wondered if I could devise an intertextual constellation to connect
affect, voyeurism and the female body? In my busy household the bathroom is the only
private space to house my own body unmasked and imperfect. Using the audience's
operational knowledge of the washroom I set out to portray the embodied private
persona and implicate the viewer by placing them in the uncomfortable position of
voyeur. With this candid scene I sought to make the invisible become visible by
portraying a personal response to the figures own body. A response intrinsically tied to
a complex range of emotions such as shame placed upon women’s bodies in our
inability to meet Western culture standards of beauty.

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PART 2) METHODOLOGY: Transgressive Tendencies

Fig. 6: Karin McGinn, In a Minute, 2017. Collage and Gouache on paper, 31 x 23 cm. Photo:
Ross Kelly.

Behind the bathrooms closed door lays a space that manifests and keeps
hidden what is secret and private. In a Minute shows the viewer what’s behind the
door— deep flesh tones mixed into dark cavernous openings (fig. 6). I paint a naked
woman self-absorbed in her own routine to remove the unsightly body hair from her
legs, an act performed largely by women (and some men). Her nakedness exposes a

16

gaping red hued hairy cunt8 and accompanying whiskery legs. While painting the
woman in In a Minute I considered how Western society designates undesirable body
traits such as excessive body hair. Intuitively9 driven, I followed the pull of the paintbrush
and found it very strange when a second face began to form itself next to the original
head. Deciding not to disregard or try to ‘fix’ I filled in the facial details of a small child,
her milky complexion taking on a ghostly presence, the girls cadaverous apparition
complete with opaquely vacant eyes. Once In a Minute was finished I studied this twoheaded hydra understanding its meaning to embody the figure’s own psychological
realm as she appears self-involved and preoccupied in her own thoughts. It has been
suggested to me by several viewers that the girl represents a younger version of the
woman herself. I believe that this open process of working has encouraged my own
creative unconscious to render spontaneously imperfect bodies that resist commercial
constructs of the female body as an objectified body-object. An example of
spontaneous execution appears in the woman’s painted right arm as an extra
appendage imbued with six fingers. Reflections of what occurs behind closed doors has
set in motion my personal voice to act out and find expression in a public form such as
an artwork. The transgressive tendencies of my own private realm has through this
artistic expression partially made itself manifest, a performative act that is further
emboldened by my research into subversive literature, which I will address shortly.
My methodology is informed by various historical and contemporary artists,
transgressive fiction and philosophy. I am inspired by writings, works of art and ideas
that promote or demonstrate an affective undoing. I want to know that systems or
complex ideas can be questioned through intertextual strategies, inversion and mixed
media to propose new understandings or alternative ways of being in one's body and in
the world.
Cultural constructs dictate who we should be according to socioeconomic
8

The Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary definition of CUNT: 1 obscene: the female genital
organs; also: sexual intercourse with a woman. 2 usually disparaging and obscene: WOMAN
9
Jennifer Fisher in Technologies of Intuition describes intuitive forces as “an extra-rational
means of understanding...simultaneously to both embodied perception and to awareness that
extends further than the five senses” (11).

17

myths⎯ not who we are. Georges Bataille10 an influential French literary figure in his
book Erotism: Death and Sensuality in Chapter V: Transgression wrote: “The
transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it” (63). In other
words, the transgression reveals a disorderly truth of not only the tabooed perspective
but offers a real admission, one which doesn’t always delineate a clear right or wrong
explanation. Bataille observed that the difficulty in defining transgression is the result of
a “certain illogicality that makes it difficult to discuss taboos” (63). I understand this
‘illogicality’ to be a self-reluctance to go against the grain of what is deemed socially
acceptable resulting in a compliancy to adhere to the status quo. Bataille’s explanation
of transgression coupled with my own personal experience in negotiating what at times
has felt like conflicting roles between personal desires and responsibilities has implored
me to consider the insider/outsider point of view, the two-headed hydra of my lived
experience. When transgression is involved what does the private persona reveal and
how does this point of view differ from a public persona? Using the bathroom as a
symbolic private space I try to respond to this idea of the real; the body exhibited in all
of its messiness exposes our animal nature and lack of control.

10

Bataille was connected to the Surrealist enterprise until he was ‘excommunicated’ by its selfappointed leader André Breton.

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2.1 The Grotesque Female Body
In Mary Russo’s essay “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory” the author
conveys a historically infamous stereotype, ‘the grotesque female body’ built on Mikhail
Bakhtin’s theory of carnival11; Russo describes a feminist social critique of the
proletariat’s carnival marketplace. According to the author, this social bias that has
claimed certain kinds of female bodies as transgressive finds its origins in early modern
Europe’s proletariat marketplace. Russo describes the carnivalesque women in direct
opposition to the Bourgeois.
“The grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the
body of becoming, process and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the
classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the
aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest to
the world” (325).
The bourgeoisies’ classical form shadows an underlying prejudice toward the other
imperfect bodies. Russo highlights the various iterations of the transgressive female
form as the pregnant, the aging, and the irregular body. In this series I’ve directed my
attention to the subversive power of the grotesque female body as a means to challenge
static notions of the bourgeois ideal and imagine new figurations of femininity and
Womaness. In In a Minute the woman’s aging body is implied with painted undulating
stomach rolls, a full-grown vagina and overly tanned skin ghosting a bikini outline. My
hope is that these imperfect body signifiers intertextually depict a woman in the midst of
her own individual story.
Russo explains the carnivalesque women as a vulnerable and marginalized
group through violation of cultural norms. According to the author, cultural theorists
analysis of this spatiotemporal era have disregarded the enduring societal impact on an
inherently undervalued group of women. On the flipside, Russo optimistically states

11

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics & Poetics of Transgression examine
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival as a cultural analytic to understanding European
cultures hierarchal division. The carnival theory defines the proletariat marketplace as an
intersection between inside and outside boundaries and high and low social order; according to
the authors, the marketplace was both scorned and fantasized by the bourgeois.

19

that the carnival women’s inability to conform could be viewed as a potential for political
agency; as outsiders free of societal constraints this group can use their own voice to
speak against hegemonic powers without risk of losing status or reputation. An
understanding of my own political agency has emerged as I recognize many artists
amongst a populace of outsiders. In this way I see modes of transgression as a way to
address the problematic assumptions relating to female bodies, sexuality, and the roles
of women. Subversive narratives convey more diverse female archetypes while at the
same time call into question homogenized sameness and the machine of economics.

20

2.2 Transgression in Fiction
Bataille applied his transgressive theory into his novel Story Of The Eye (1928).
Blush-evoking in every way the story fantasizes a teenage boy’s sexual trysts with his
two young female lovers. Sparing no squeamish reader, the author details a queasy
cross-contamination of bodily fluids: “The resulting stench of blood, sperm, urine and
vomit made me almost recoil in horror, but the inhuman shriek from Marcelle’s throat
was far more terrifying” (17). Bataille’s excessive use of bodily fluids throughout the
story elucidates its functioning role of the abject to signify a crossing over of physical
inside-outside boundaries as well as exhibits one of cultural, moral and artistic boundary
crossing. The success of Bataille’s transgressive fiction is seen in the way it challenges
the audience to examine one's own discomfort regarding sexual taboos.
In Kathy Acker’s infamous12 book Blood and Guts in High School13 the author
uses shock tactics like violating the incest taboo to demonstrate a transgressive
narrative. Acker tells a story of a young woman in love with her ‘father'. The author’s
direct and dirty language elicits an emotional response to her character’s insecurities
and anguish: “He fucked her in the asshole cause the infection made her cunt hurt too
much to fuck there, though she didn’t tell him it hurt badly there, too, cause she wanted
to fuck love more than she felt pain” (21). Acker has received criticism by feminists for
using phallocentric themes as it creates a causal objectification of women. A legitimate
fear of perpetuating negative stories about women, though it is in this uncomfortable
place that Acker disarms her readers into experiencing her protagonists’ unjust world.
Throughout the story the main character objectives herself by sexualizing her body for
mistaken love putting her male lovers needs before her own. “Michiko Kakutani
described Acker's style in a 1987 review in The New York Times:
“Characters exchange identities with the ease of snakes shedding their skins; and bits
of myths, folktales and older novels also turn up transformed -- juxtaposed, in a sort of
post-modernist collage, with political screeds, dream-like hallucinations and strange,
comic exchanges. The language is nervous and skewed; the authorial stance,
adversarial and abrasive; the world view, cynical verging on the nihilistic.”” (NY Times).
12
13

The book was banned in West Germany and South Africa.
Blood and Guts in High School is considered a metafiction as it refers to its own fiction.

21

Acker’s cut-up/collage writing methods leaves her reader with the unsettling inability to
forecast the stories next step creating an affective anxiety in her audience. Her ability to
evoke anxiety in tandem with abject signifiers are intertextual connections that I am
exploring in my own artwork. In In a Minute the figure’s open pussy is at the forefront of
the picture plane; with this central imagery my intention was to point directly to an
aberration of normative representations. In researching transgressive fiction I’ve
discovered the protagonists in this genre are usually characterized as troubled outsiders
or free agents living outside an established social order where the rules either don’t
apply or they simply disregard. Although Bataille and Acker’s stylistic choice of shock
tactics might turn some audience away, their subversive expression calls attention to a
marginalized voice experiencing the imbalances and injustices of a class ranking
system. I find this type of risk taking inspiring as their subversive stories have pioneered
and defined the outer fray of artistic expression.

22

PART 3) AFFECTIVE UNDOING:
1.1 The Abject

Fig. 7: Karin McGinn, Bloody Hell, 2017. Collage and gouache on paper, 41 x 31 cm. Photo:
Ross Kelly.

The materiality of paint offers an expressive means to insert my personal
narrative or voice into each painting. In BLOODY HELL I sought to visually induce mess
and spillage as a way to allude to a very bad day. Water spurts out of the sink and pools
onto the floor while the death mask figure absently spills coffee from her mug making its

23

own messy puddle (fig. 7). The seepage continues as her menstrual blood collects
inside her pantyliner and seen once more in the blood-soaked tampon inch worms
crawling in formation across the tiled floor. In Julia Kristeva’s POWERS OF HORROR:
An Essay on Abjection the author points to the power of the abject not to forecast death
but as signifier(s) calling attention to the immediacy of life:
“A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does
not signify death ㄧ a flat encephalograph, for instance ㄧ I would understand, react, or
accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me
what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this
shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There I am
at the border of my condition as a living being” (3).
Applying abject imagery is a strategy I have recently tuned into in the work BLOODY
HELL I call attention to skin, blood and bones as a reminder of my own humanness,
physicality and impermanence. These uncomfortable signifiers disrupt idealized notions
of the feminine by exposing tabooed private moments of discharge and drainage.
Signifiers of spillage push out to create an inevitable loss of boundaries and affective
anxiety in the inability to contain them. In Undoing Gender, Butler considers how
humanity's reliance on each other beginning at “infancy constitutes a necessary
dependency, one that we never leave behind” (24). The philosopher reflects on how our
affect on one another renders us vulnerable by poetically stating, “we’re undone by
each other” (19). In pursuing female embodiment my research seeks out this ineffable
emotional and psychic undoing using the abject as an affective visual language. The
absence of skin on the woman’s face exposes her skull to reiterate acts of undoing and
impermanence. Disparate and uncomfortable narratives emerge between reality and
fantasy.

24

3.2 Systemic Undoing
In tracing Western culture’s recent history back to colonialism one can situate a
subjectivity constituted from the assumptions of class, race and gender exclusion. My
understanding of hegemonic power is formed by political theorist Michel Foucault’s
historical research on the interrogation of systemic powers of influence in contemporary
Western and Eurocentric cultures. In Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archeology of
Human Sciences the philosopher calls upon ‘epistemological awareness’ to
understanding present day order he examines past systems which gave shape to the
knowledge of that time:
“It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for
it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose
their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself
sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the
best ones” (xxii).
Through the application of knowledge Foucault questions modes of power looking for
evidence and possibilities to expand our limited space of knowledge and thusly gain
insight into how one can think beyond our own linear systems. Foucault encourages
terms of otherness as a means to destabilize the unitary voice of conformity, creating
space for new idiosyncratic systems. In my art practice I similarly look to concepts of
otherness to question assumptions about the prevailing systems of order and policing
gender.
Aligning with Foucault’s interrogation of systemic power, Donna Haraway in her
essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective” delivers a feminist viewpoint of Western masculinist philosophers
and scientists misuse of the term objectivity in order to administer the illusion of one
atomic truth. Haraway explains objectivity as a philosophical impossibility by pointing to
the shortcomings of this male-centric constructed perspective: “The god-eye trick is an
illusionistic and ideological vision that fails to demonstrate real objectivity” (582). She
argues that the hegemonic majority is so focused on flexing power that they can never
truly portray objectivity. For this reason, the author believes that subjugated groups

25

might in actuality be closer to discovering a place of “objectivity as its origin comes from
embodied knowledge and not one of allegories and governing ideologies” (583).
Foucault and Stewart’s interrogation of hierarchal order encourage forms of otherness
to question hegemonies inherent notion of absolute power. By portraying subversive
narratives alongside a feminist perspective I see emerging ways to destabilize the
unitary voice of conformity and to create space for my own idiosyncratic voice.

Fig 8: Allison Hrabluik. This Is The Way They Make Us Bend, 2013. Screen capture of animation
short, 3:25 min. Used by permission of the artist.

In This Is The Way They Make Us Bend (2013),14 a single channel video,
Vancouver artist Allison Hrabluik takes on the invisible forces of hierarchal power (fig. 8).
Beginning with the title the audience understands that ‘they’ infers to a loss of control
for the sole character in the film. Who are they? Is a question that the audience never

14

You can watch Allison Hrabluik’s animation here: This Is The Way They Make Us Bend

26

discovers the answer to; this knowledge exists in the prelude along with an undisclosed
story of how this human-like form came to be. Constructed as a 2-D cutout, she is
made from human-shaped paper parts fastened together to form a creature-like entity.
The artist sets the stage with pencil numbered silhouettes drawn onto the paper
backdrop numbered 1 up to 300 choreographed movements foreshadow her imminent
steps. The figure begins her dissent across the screen, pausing at each coordinate; she
carries herself with a jarring motion that is reminiscent of unwieldy machine parts.
Hrabluik envisions a female figuration without a head to empower itself— a headless
conjoined twin pinned together at the neck supports two torsos and three legs; the
result echoes a violent intervention. The figure hop-steps backwards then flipping her
twin onto her other back determinedly piggybacks forward to retrace any missed
coordinates. The audio transmits the chug of mechanical clunking, squeaky parts that
need lubrication, and a door shutting. These noises are the strange sound-offs her body
makes each time she shifts into the next move. The figure’s submissive yet persistent
performance conveys an undoing for the audience that her actions are met with an
empathetic response. In BLOODY HELL I too imagine the permeation of outside forces
by depicting a man outside of the window, his presence a lurking reminder of these
exterior influences. The man cast in shadow looks up to the window linking him to the
interior scene of spillage and undoing. While the influence of Hrabluik’s work on my own
might at first appear disconnected, this psychological presence that the artist evokes
has seeped into my imagination and open process.

27

3.3 Humour and Absurdity

Fig. 9: Karin McGinn, Mrs. PEE, 2017. Collage and gouache on paper, 41 x 31 cm. Photo: Ross
Kelly.

In Mrs. PEE my female figuration escapes the confines of the bathroom, but not
without first highlighting its central abject signifier– the toilet (fig. 9). I paint a woman
with a literal potty bowl in place of a real head as a metaphor for the illogical that I
encounter in my own everyday reality. Employing transgressive tendencies I subvert the
natural order of things by implementing absurdist possibilities. I imagine absurdity as a
formal question and in the process destabilize both the audience and myself. A comic

28

incident takes over as her bowl head teeters and sloshes seconds before bright yellow
urine and pooh hit the floor. Following this inversion of logic, I try to envision what it
would mean to have a toilet head instead of a real head, a dreadful way of being in the
world signaling a lack of bodily control. Pictures of Mrs. PEE’s family are hung behind
her on the wallpapered living room wall. I paint a small potty head boy and an oldfashioned grandfather urinal both fixed into collage wood-textured frames. Ancestral
lines are hard to escape from and impossible to break. I find Mrs. PEE’s painterly
existence equal parts disturbing and funny. In Sheri Klein’s book Art and Laughter the
author asks her reader to consider the subversive nature of humour by questioning why
artists create humour driven work? And what can be achieved through this specific form
of expression? Klein investigates humor as a way to communicate what lies beneath the
surface stating: “All humour is subversive, that is, it aims to disrupt our assumptions,
emotions, patterns of thinking, ways of knowing and the world as we know it” (132). The
material collage at times refuses to be contained; it spills over the paper substrate and
ruptures the idea of kept order. I think about how I am attracted to rebellious thinkers
and cherish moments filled with abject seepage (birth and sickness) that also refuse to
be contained. In this way both the material collage and the abject contribute to a loss of
control. Humour helps me to temper this sense of loss in both the real and imaginary.
Laughter’s affect allows me to stay loose and to invoke play as an integral component
of the creative process.
In Henri Bergson’s essay, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic the
philosopher explains how laughter is used to explain current events and connect a
community together using societal signifiers:
“To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which
is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social
one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter
must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social
signification. […]” (22).
In the artwork I apply humour to point to absurdist moments observed in authority,
consumerism and the everyday. In BLOODY HELL a dark mise en scène of
misshappenings detail the woman’s plight that is except for a personalized coffee cup

29

reading Mom. The cup is Bergson’s social signification of the familiar to convey ‘a life in
common.’ Although the woman’s flesh on her face has disintegrated leaving her skull
exposed, her humanness remains visible via the cup, after all haven’t we all had a
bloody hell kind of day? In Mrs. PEE the woman’s ridiculous toilet head attempts to
explain the tension between absurdity and tragic circumstance. In my real life I have
observed a parallel between absurd happenings and tragic incidences, a realization that
has enabled me to appreciate dark humour as life occurrences are complicated and
enduring without laughter’s release.

30

PART 4) CRITICAL REFLECTION: a stick in the spokes

Fig. 10: Karin McGinn. 2017 a stick in the spokes, ECUAD MFA Graduate Exhibition, Charles H.
Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Ross Kelly.

During our graduating group exhibition critique of a stick in the spokes, the
attending curators15 made thoughtful and humorous contributions to how
Mis(s)representations (fig. 10,11), my series of five works operate within the context and
reception of the gallery. Throughout the critique I noted the explicit language used for
speaking about these artworks. It was as if the paintings themselves gave the idea of a
frank response from its audience. Prior to the opening I comparably observed how
viewers encountering the work would make comments using an unabashed vocabulary.
One example occurred while discussing space allocation with a fellow classmate; she
shared a comment her husband made regarding our works close proximity in the
gallery. In a deadpan manner, he cracked, “Looks like you’re right next to the tits and
15

2017. Graduating exhibition group critiques held in the Charles H. Scott Gallery with visiting
curators: Jonathan Middleton, Vanessa Kwan and Pablo de Ocampo.

31

turds section.” His comment made me laugh, not only for its directness but also for its
crude accuracy. The show didn’t stop there.

Fig. 10: Karin McGinn. 2017 a stick in the spokes, ECUAD MFA Graduate Exhibition, Charles H.
Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Ross Kelly.

The curators similarly described all of the works in Mis(s)representations using
explicit potty mouth terms. Pablo de Ocampo noted a reduction of body parts—
pointing to the collaged “dickhead” in The Milky Way as well as the painted “fishhead” in
Seaman’s Prize Catch as “two examples of large stereotypes associated with gender
roles; the catch is a prize to possess and dickhead conveys the relationship between
male and female alluding to the objectification of the body.” From the two larger works
de Ocampo moved his commentary onto the bathroom themed pieces by stating: “The
three smaller scale works are unified by body shaving, blood, piss─ things that are not
seen nor talked about. Disfigured forms spewing piss and shit out of a toilet.” In contrast

32

to de Campo’s colourful expletives came a different reaction from another curator. With
one eyebrow raised, Vanessa Kwan cast an uncomfortable and wearisome gaze
towards the three potty themed pieces Mrs. PEE, BLOODY HELL and In a Minute. Kwan
wondered aloud, “Who is the audience for these images?” Moments later, answering
her own question she stated: “Desire and horror. The male gaze makes visible and
describes what that trajectory is—femininity and how we look at women.” She
described feeling, an affective curiosity towards the work and wondered aloud, “Is it
meant as a social critique?” Kwan summarized with a bold statement: “Fuck you. The
work is affront; this is what happens. These paintings are making a vocabulary of what
happens.”
Notably, the curators paid special attention to my most recent addition in this
series The Milky Way. In Jonathan Middleton’s words he observed, “The Milky Way
gives an open read with a perplexity of things to come back to which makes it strong;
like the nipples which have a tentacular quality.” Kwan finished off the discussion of The
Milky Way with a summation that the work shows a consideration of sexual pleasure,”
with a final declaration, “Lets all fuck in space!”

33

4.1 The Future

Fig. 11: Karin McGinn. The Milky Way, 2017. Gouache and collage on paper, 46 x 61 cm. Photo:
Ross Kelly.

Upon entering Emily Carr’s MFA program two years ago, I felt a pull to make
work about what I felt most knowledgeable, that is and remains an intimacy of my own
bodily knowledge. With my final piece, The Milky Way I have experienced a slight shift
towards a less subjective position. While making this work I dreamt of a cosmological
stage, a state of mind that enabled me to see outside of the comfort of my own personal
experiences. In this cosmic cabaret sexy skeleton women dance alongside a celestial
myriad-breasted wonder. Here I sought to create a cast of characters that didn’t already
exist in the world, a consideration that has led me to conjure playful interrelations
between a fleshy octopus and a tenticular-tittied Queen. The Milky Way has given me
new confidence to build on my political agency in order to address the absurd

34

hegemony of this era. In The Milky Way I collage a woman’s leg donning a thigh-high
black leather boot with the word NASTY bedazzled on its shiny surface; a nod to the
highly contentious US president Trump’s multiple offences including misogynist
commentary directed at his rival Hillary Clinton. Discovering collages political agency
alongside intertextual strategies and transgressive inversions has provided emergent
understandings as well as alternative forms to visually express being in one's body and
in the world. This brings me back to my central research question: Can one affect the
conventional order of things through transgressive renderings of the female form?
Current sociopolitical events in my own spatiotemporal existence show
me that gendered mis(s)representations persist in Western culture as women still strive
for the same rights as men. According to a recent article published by The Globe and
Mail gender pay disparity isn’t going away anytime soon 16despite higher levels of
education women earn 10 - 30% less than their male coworkers in Canada.
Simultaneously advertising campaigns propagate a cultural obsession with celebrity and
youth culture as a way to endorse products based on falsities of immortalization and
unattainable beauty standards. Contrary to the perfection that we see in commercial
advertising the transgressive body signals an aberration of idealized representations. Its
messy imagery of visceral blood and decay recalls the physicality of nature demanding
our immediate attention to acknowledge other world systems of eroticism, continuous
and non-continuous bodies encapsulated within life cycles that live outside of
advertisers reach. This art as research investigation has led me to envision the body as
transitory and fluid, to continue to push the boundaries of otherness and bad taste as a
way to question the accepted realities of a franchised world.

16

“A woman working full time in Canada makes 73.5 cents for every dollar a man makes,
according to updated Statistics Canada income data produced for The Globe and Mail – a
persistent wage gap that continues even though women's educational attainment has surpassed
that of men and amid widespread recognition of the issue among Canadians” (The Globe and
Mail).

35

Works Cited

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39

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40