FIRST PLACE AWARD
Ghislaine Fremaux
(Lubbock, TX)
Artist Website
Winona, Pastel, resin on paper, 87" x 51"
These drawings are the culmination of an interdisciplinary project examining the practice of social nudism among senior citizens. The works portray nudists over sixty years of age, each a resident of an intentional community in southern Texas. All subjects' participation was voluntary, and their poses were not instructed. Each drawing is executed in chalk pastel and fossilized under glossy resin, redolent of sweat. The nudists' exposure, which is for them 'normal', total, and not indicative of a surrender of power to the observer, challenges the objectifying trope of the "artistic nude". The aging body is widely ridiculed in media culture - a culture that works to compress bodies, with their great complexity, mutability, actions, and intensities, into flat, static images for judgment and consumption. I seek here to present these bodies not as images, but as living events. They are exhibited unframed, enabling the paper ('porous', perforable, and absorbent like skin) to itself be naked.