Kiss Me Deadly

Project Description:

For this project, created for my Performance of Craft class, I wanted to bring the guilty pleasure, in all its sheer delight, to the forefront.  My painting, Kiss Me Deadly, featuring 1980s and 1990s music icons Lita Ford, Tom Keifer and Grace Jones, is presented on a large canvas (48 x 36) that also showcases a large disco ball,  a tipped over martini glass, dropping olives in its wake and a large stage in the forefront. This creation is a celebration of 1980s rock, where sensory pleasures of all types were glorified.  The three characters I painted, along with the hedonistic background, are each, in their own way,  icons of guilty pleasure. 1980s rock icon Lita Ford crouches in her metallic dress from her “Lita” album. Her music embodies intensity, drama and sexiness. The painting also showcases Tom Keifer of the hair metal band, Cinderella. When I listen to Keifer and Cinderella describing a woman, I feel empowered. Next is my rendition of Grace Jones, in her role in as the vampire stripper Katrina in "Vamp". Katrina is a strong sexy role, and I feel that she too typifies 1980s glam guilty pleasures, with campy and glamorous notes, the perfect guilty pleasure. My painting is presented on a large canvas because oversized works are dazzling and eye-catching. I want viewers to indulge in the excess of art that was created only for beauty and drama and to allow craft to glamorously lean into its “feminine pastime” persona. 

Faculty Response by Barbara Browning: 

Alexis was a member of a seminar I taught last semester on Craft and/as Performance. This was an advanced seminar in the Department of Performance Studies, and as the title suggests, I was hoping to make an argument that while performance is increasingly making inroads in the world of visual art, craft, with its inherent focus on process, was always already, in the words of curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, "inextricably linked to performance." I was delighted to have Alexis as a participant in this conversation, because with her ongoing artistic practice (as a painter and collage artist) and her experience working with a gallerist, she was particularly aware of the art historical context framing our study. She also brought to the table a nuanced approach to the feminist theory that guided many of our discussions. On a practical level, she gamely took on new craft techniques, and on a theoretical level, she was always curious and exploratory, willing to push the discussion in challenging directions. While clearly invested in questions of gender politics, she never defers by default to reductive notions of what that might mean. Her final project included a large-scale artistic work, accompanied by an imaginative artist's statement that included personal narrative and poetry in addition to an artistic credo. It ended, tellingly, "My painting is presented on a large canvas... I love the idea of a guilty pleasure taking up space, especially in an academic setting... I wanted to allow both myself as the artist and the viewers to indulge in the excess of art that was created only for beauty and drama and to allow craft to glamorously lean into its 'feminine pastime' persona." What I found most impressive about Alexis was her unapologetic embrace, precisely, of this notion of the "guilty pleasure" - a pleasure which animates not only her visual art, but also her writing about it. Her capacity to both create and enjoy a shamelessly femme world of expressivity is striking. Alexis is refreshingly willing to ask questions, live with contradictions, and experiment with possibilities.