Deidre But-Husaim
Exhibitions
Beauty Marks - 2007
Deidre But-HusaimBeauty MarksNovember 1 - 24, 2007 In past works Deidre has used 'pin up' images from the 1950's to highlight body modification and extremes of beauty and desire. Her current series of work looks at the idea of beauty in non-mainstream subcultures, many of her portraits feature tattoos as a transformative element. "Every culture has its own definition of what's beautiful. As the world gets smaller our ideas about what's beautiful get larger. Ideas of beauty and body modification have been the main theme of my work for several years. More recently I have been interested in how tattoos and piercings can transform not only body and soul, but also the world around them. Our body is now experienced less as a fixed entity and more as a changeable project of technological, medical and artistic invention." Deidre But-Husaim, artist statement, 2007 The source of the portraits are images taken from the internet, a medium where on average the viewer only looks at the screen image for a few moments. By painting these images, labouring over them in rich oil paint, the original is transformed and more is bought to the image than originally intended. "My paintings depicting people from an internet body modification community and document a marginalised non-mainstream subculture of our time. When viewing images on the internet on average we look at them for just a few seconds, this is a instant/virtual way of looking. By painting these images, a time based process in itself and placing them in a gallery context, a different medium and format than their origin, the images can be viewed in a leisurely/physical and more considered way, allowing the viewer to have a different dialogue with the image through the convention of oil painting." Deidre But-Husaim, artist statement, 2007
Swan Hunters - 2010
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