Miranda Holmes
My work explores how capitalism merges with feminism to exploit female-identified bodies and their personal experiences. The meeting point of feminist ideology and capitalist coercion persists at the female-identified body. My work grapples with the consequences of maintaining high visibility of bodies as a liberating strategy. Parsing the feminist values I’ve collected from the persuasion of neo-liberalism is a continuous act of unlearning. When do my strategies and daily habits fulfill myself and my community, and when do they feed into the optimized agenda of capitalism and the patriarchy? How do I stay vigilant as capitalism adopts feminism’s creative liberating solutions and tries to sell them back to me in an ad for leggings? Where does painting perpetuate this exploitation, and where can it incite joyful possibilities of being? Drawing from my own dreams, experiences, and desires, I make work that maintains female-bodied figures in hyper-visibility through color saturation, warped perspectives, and disorienting forms. I find joy in making tongue-in-cheek work, constantly reconfiguring perspectives, running toward new insights, and then falling on my face.