KISS GROWL SCREAM: About

The paintings of Kiss Growl Scream come out of a period in my life when I was questioning how to move into a most definite older middle age. These paintings are not about accepting aging gracefully, they’re about not accepting the given notions of aging at all. When I was about 30, in 1990, I bought a fur coat from the local goodwill. I cut it up into small pieces and used mustache glue to paste it to my naked body. I poured red paint over my head and directed my then roommate to photograph the whole process/performance of me acting out ‘the monstrous feminine’ & ‘the bestial notions of female sexuality’. I rediscovered the photographs almost 30 years later and made these paintings. They’re partly my working out a new way of mark making with oil paint. But they’re also Frankensteins: pieces of all the gendered gazes stuck haphazardly to my body and stitched back together in a pastiche of ‘female’— a frustrated sub-human creature trying to break out of a misogynistic narrative.