Biography: Carey McDougall is an Assistant Professor of Art at Kent State University Stark Campus where she also coordinates the Women's Studies Program. As a sculptor and performance artist she creates art to offer her audiences opportunities to experience and reflect upon fluid boundaries and slippery identities. She is motivated by elusive femininity, bodies that don't obey, and the circulation of shame.
Artist Statement
All You Need Is Love stills from two digital videos
While feminism has done much to create more choices for women, including the choice not to have children or to marry later, the stigma of being childless and unmarried is still strong. Still lacking such a positive and potentially exciting word as bachelor, single women are relegated as oddities, mistakes, unfortunate defaults in a hetero system where we are born to couple and reproduce. This negative situating of women's choices to not couple is fostered by the popular, incessant and mythic stories of romantic love the media provides us with. A constant barrage of prods to fall in love, advertising, television, movies, and music create an ongoing hypnotic love-wash that provides us with what we come to believe as the necessity and all-powerful quality of love. We fall in love with the notion of love, an obsession similar to my dog trying to catch his tail. With lyrics taken from the popular cinderella (she's not only poor but now a prostitute) movie Moulin Rouge, my video All You Need is Love juxtaposes the scripted and canned quality of how we define and identify love with imagery of purposeful destruction of one of the most prevalent symbols of female [re]productivity, the egg. Fully regaled in feminine dress, aware of the limited supply of eggs, and deliberately blowing her part of the deal, the main character in All You Need is Love daily works toward a different type of productivity.
All You Need Is Love II explores the effort it takes to remain not pregnant, a feat for some women and one that is rarely looked upon as a commendable effort once you are past 18. Older but still dressed in feminine flowery attire, the female character in this second video spends her time jumping up and down on a trampoline as she shakes a large jar of cream, turning it into butter. As cream is a product that depends on cows remaining in a constant post-pregnancy phase of lactation, the main character in this work presents her contradictory stance against breeding. Her ridiculous jumping (a folk-lore tactic prescribed to women to abort or rid themselves of sperm) creates the audio of a bed squeaking as she holds dearly her soon-to-be-butter. These videos work to explore the awkwardness of feminist femininity, full of contradictions, never fully resolved and always poking fun at itself as it offers up new role models still slightly addicted to the old ones.
Artist Gallery
Contact
To learn more about Carey McDougall and her work, reach her at:
Carey E. McDougall Assistant Professor of Art Coordinator of Women's Studies Kent State University Stark Campus Fine Arts 6000 Frank Avenue NW Canton, OH 44720
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Confidence I love this piece! It embodies so many truths that we sometimes can not see until someone eloquently spells it out, lit...
Meet the Cover Artist
Malgorzata Jasinska: Artist Statement
My curse is my gift. My nightmares, deep sensitivity, and emotional instability gives the best (and most uncomfortable) inspirations I could ever have. For me, art is passion - and visions are the mirror, which show my feelings and connect me with the rest of the world. Read More...
Biography: Carey McDougall is an Assistant Professor of Art at Kent State University Stark Campus where she also coordinates the Women's Studies Program. As a sculptor and performance artist she creates art to offer her audiences opportunities to experience and reflect upon fluid boundaries and slippery identities. She is motivated by elusive femininity, bodies that don't obey, and the circulation of shame. 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
