Claire Stigliani

Gallery Affiliations: Dean Jensen Gallery

Region: Midwest

I tell stories about women, finding inspiration in paintings, photographs, magazines, posters, YouTube clips, literature, performance, and plays. My paintings are like episodes in an unconventional romantic comedy, with myself cast as the heroine, writer, and director. The scenes depict my fantasies and secret desires. They explore the act of watching and being watched and blur fiction and reality.

The paintings are constructed like Victorian photo collages. Placed in a new space, the appropriated images are transformed. The settings are skewed, tipped, and condensed, and linear perspective is abandoned. The images venerate what is seen at a remove.

My work mythologizes and deconstructs mediated images of women. I am interested in how femininity is portrayed. The historical, folkloric, and contemporary female characters of my paintings act as the subject and the viewer. My work has no heroines or victims. Rather, it indulges in the gratuitous pleasures of youth, beauty, sex, and fantasy.