Mis(s)representations: Reimagining Women with Collage and Paint

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?