Poignant Pics no. 78: On Robin Assner-Alvey's "Untitled (Image Transfer #37)"
“When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet.”
Untitled (Image Transfer #37
A bit over a year ago, I came across the self-portraiture of Robin Assner-Alvey. I couldn't look away. Not like the transfixion that happens seeing an accident by the side of the road, but rather from a curiosity about the message she was sending by making grotesque her own body.
Louis Fermor has written of the grotesque in contemporary art, "intentional, explicit distortion and its bringing forth of the 'unsaid,' highlights the boundaries, restrictions, and standards we have for that given thing. In the case of the feminine grotesque, the distortion is bringing forth the unsaid and impossible criteria we have in place for women." This difference in female bodies—that they are unlike the dominant artworld creators' white male bodies—makes them objects of desire as well as (unfortunately!) objects of revulsion. In both cases, "aberrant."
Think of work by Cindy Sherman. In her early works, she created characters by adopting behaviors we think of as "feminine." More recently, while still inventing personas (albeit more irreverently), her digital tools allow her to say something new about the female visage via her contorted, disturbing, if cartoonish form. A societal and gender commentary. Tess Thackara writes, “This hunger to explore and break down the boundaries of human experience, however anxious or unsettling—to deconstruct and reinvent the body—is generating some of the most vital and complex art being made today." Similarly, Assner-Alvey's photographs invite us to locate beauty in the splintered, distorted, disturbing and imperfect. While deeply personal, they also speak to women and our experience of our bodies more universally.
Assner-Alvey told me that using her body repetitiously displays her ongoing struggle to gather and reconstruct the fractured pieces of her humanity. She continued, "The process of image transfers mimics the textures of skin and creates a bifurcated visceral, painterly image."
For me, the works created by Assner-Alvey are brave, explorational, and exciting. I can't wait to see what she does next.
Artist Bio
Robin Assner-Alvey (b.1978, Massachusetts) is a practicing artist working with photography, video and installation. She received her BFA from the University of Connecticut (2000) and her MFA from the Ohio State University (2002). Throughout Robin’s art practice, she uses her personal experiences as a starting point for her ideas and then investigates those ideas by experimenting with various photographic processes. Robin is also a Professor of Art at Webster University in St. Louis, MO, where she teaches all levels of photography, as well as other time-based. More of her work can be found at https://robin-assneralvey.squarespace.com.
Author Bio
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.