The task of documenting the evolution of the self over time has been attempted by women artists throughout history. The practice of this documentation has been greatly enhanced in the last several years by the progression of new technologies for the capture of digital images, the advent of the internet as a common textual and visual communication device, and the availability of free resources to publish and disseminate the resulting constructions. Women artists now have the tools needed to document the life of the self, and to publish it immediately to an audience. Most of the women documenting their lives on-line, in real time, do not consider themselves to be artists, and the art world has yet to embrace their practice as artistic activity. But as documents of women's performance, these sites are important historical, visual and cultural occurrences. In addition to containing both textual and visual elements, these endeavors incorporate and elucidate the concept of performativity of gender. In watching these sites (cams and blogs) of women's performance over time, it becomes clear that identities are complex constitutive creations, on both sides of the computer screen. The women of this study are doing, making and inventing a way to assemble the stories of their lives for a reading and looking audience in a manner that calls attention to the way all subjects are made by language and culture. The sites of these productions, located in the space of the internet, offer the spectator an opportunity to interface and form relationships with visual materials and contents. In the space opened up between viewer and artist/performer, identity work can be accomplished and the masquerade of femininity can be critically assessed in new and engaging ways. The challenge and the promise of this research: the journey into the spaces of these sites, with all of their varied formations of identity and performance as woman, will provide a document that both claims these practices as unique artistic performances of self and delineates new possibilities for looking.

The poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch presents as self-writing nestled in the wide embrace of non-linear écriture féminine. Each poem offers a glimpse of the persona: body and soul, the music of her voice and the perspective of her spirit. Together the poems comprise verbal self-portraits of a lovelorn soul, torn between impulses to fully remember and deliberately forget. Through years of love, life, disappointment, bouts of depression and renewed promise, Dahlia Ravikovitch continued to compose. Through the crystals of poetry the speaker examines, from varying angles and in multiple refractions of light, those figures of alterity who are her self. For Ravikovitch poetry was the only neutral space in which her self could comfortably exist and, even so, not always. The poet-persona experiences love in unsuitable proportions. She receives too little; she goes ‘overboard’ and ‘out of bounds’ in giving too much. She experiences love, even when accessible, as an affliction. She suffers love. She laments love. The persona performs her malaise through contrasting physical sensations, idiosyncrasies and profound cravings. Her personal thermostat is erratic. She exhibits pronounced wardrobe-predilections. Her throat reacts to a flow of eros and creative vitality or lack thereof. She yearns for pure memory and thirsts for pure essence. The speaker’s gallery displays an elaborate montage of a golden apple endowed with gifts of wisdom, eros, poetry and passion, alongside portraits of a royal chanteuse and a skilled scribe. Crucial brushstrokes illuminate lovers and sinners, souls in flames, shipwrecks, lyric-expressive throats in various states of constriction and release, as well as voices of collective responsibility. Ravikovitch encrypts her poetry with rich resources of biblical, rabbinic, medieval and early modern Hebrew literature. She forwards the linguistic and literary resonance of these layers. She innovates upon their motifs through feats in the dimensions of feminine writing, intertextual engagements and postmodern poetics.

Laura Aguilar, John Coplans, and Carla Williams explore, through photographic self-portraiture, the representation of unconventional bodies. Even though the images produced by these artists are quite different in style, they all reflect an interest in a representation of the nude human body that challenges the traditional concepts of beauty so prevalent in a Western society obsessed with physical perfection. Even though the three artists produced their photographic self-portraits at roughly the same time, using the traditional gelatin silver process and responding to standards of classical beauty, their divergent life experiences, education, and social backgrounds have led them to question an almost universal vision of the perfect body from a broad spectrum of perspectives.

The poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch presents as self-writing nestled in the wide embrace of non-linear écriture féminine. Each poem offers a glimpse of the persona: body and soul, the music of her voice and the perspective of her spirit. Together the poems comprise verbal self-portraits of a lovelorn soul, torn between impulses to fully remember and deliberately forget. Through years of love, life, disappointment, bouts of depression and renewed promise, Dahlia Ravikovitch continued to compose. Through the crystals of poetry the speaker examines, from varying angles and in multiple refractions of light, those figures of alterity who are her self. For Ravikovitch poetry was the only neutral space in which her self could comfortably exist and, even so, not always. The poet-persona experiences love in unsuitable proportions. She receives too little; she goes ‘overboard’ and ‘out of bounds’ in giving too much. She experiences love, even when accessible, as an affliction. She suffers love. She laments love. The persona performs her malaise through contrasting physical sensations, idiosyncrasies and profound cravings. Her personal thermostat is erratic. She exhibits pronounced wardrobe-predilections. Her throat reacts to a flow of eros and creative vitality or lack thereof. She yearns for pure memory and thirsts for pure essence. The speaker’s gallery displays an elaborate montage of a golden apple endowed with gifts of wisdom, eros, poetry and passion, alongside portraits of a royal chanteuse and a skilled scribe. Crucial brushstrokes illuminate lovers and sinners, souls in flames, shipwrecks, lyric-expressive throats in various states of constriction and release, as well as voices of collective responsibility. Ravikovitch encrypts her poetry with rich resources of biblical, rabbinic, medieval and early modern Hebrew literature. She forwards the linguistic and literary resonance of these layers. She innovates upon their motifs through feats in the dimensions of feminine writing, intertextual engagements and postmodern poetics.

My painted self-portraiture explores identity as changing social performance or masquerade and examines bodily flesh as the vital interface for reciprocal encounter on life’s stage. The larger-than-life sized images demand viewer attention and compel intersubjective engagement. The works also affirm artistic agency and subjective presence through gestural brushwork and the vivifying power of oil paint. Hybridity and ambiguity in the images suggest the dynamic and reflexive nature of identity. A theatrical colour palette further reinforces the notion of identity as social performance or masquerade. Conceptually the works are rooted in both post-modern feminism and phenomenology. Artistically they draw inspiration from contemporary figurative painters and portraitists who use this medium and genre to navigate the boundaries of self and society.

My painted self-portraiture explores identity as changing social performance or masquerade and examines bodily flesh as the vital interface for reciprocal encounter on life’s stage. The larger-than-life sized images demand viewer attention and compel intersubjective engagement. The works also affirm artistic agency and subjective presence through gestural brushwork and the vivifying power of oil paint. Hybridity and ambiguity in the images suggest the dynamic and reflexive nature of identity. A theatrical colour palette further reinforces the notion of identity as social performance or masquerade. Conceptually the works are rooted in both post-modern feminism and phenomenology. Artistically they draw inspiration from contemporary figurative painters and portraitists who use this medium and genre to navigate the boundaries of self and society.

Orientador: Roberto Berton de Angelo / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T18:43:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Botti_MarianaMeloniVieira_M.pdf: 6142175 bytes, checksum: 322562b03355eea9eadb6d16651db0f9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: Esta dissertação tem como objetivo principal investigar a problemática do auto-retrato fotográfico produzido por artistas brasileiras na contemporaneidade, trazendo como perspectiva de análise os estudos de gênero. Em um primeiro momento, realizamos uma contextualização histórica a fim de apresentar a intersecção entre arte e gênero, levantando algumas informações e exemplos sobre auto-retratos de mulheres no universo artístico. Mais adiante, em um segundo instante, analisamos a obra de seis artistas brasileiras contemporâneas que utilizaram suas próprias imagens fotográficas para comporem seus trabalhos. Essas artistas são: Brigida Baltar, Lourdes Colombo, Nazareth Pacheco, Neide Jallageas, Rochelle Costi e Rosângela Rennó. A pesquisa se ancora numa revisão bibliográfica multidisciplinar e no depoimento dessas artistas, a fim de estudar as necessidades e estratégias de elaboração da auto-imagem na atualidade, atravessando por questões centrais como a memória, a identidade, o corpo e o gênero feminino enquanto vivido e construído / Abstract: This dissertation investigates the problematic of the photographic self-portraiture produced by brazilian artists in contemporaneousness, bringing the gender studies as a perspective of analysis. At a first moment, we developed an historic contextualization to present the intersection between art and gender, rising some informatÍon and examples about women se1f-portraits in the artistic universe. Further on, at a second instant, we analysed the production of six contemporary brazilian artists that used their own photographic images to compose their works. These artists are: Brígida Baltar, Lourdes Colombo, Nazareth Pacheco, Neide Jallageas, Rochelle Costi and Rosângela Rennó. The research is based on a multidisciplinary bibliographic revision and interviews with these artists, in order to study the necessities and strategies of self-image elaboration nowadays, going beyond main questions such as memory, identity, body and the female gender as a lived and constructed concept / Mestrado / Mestre em Multimeios

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In 1508 Albrecht Dürer, famed German printmaker and Nürnberg citizen, was commission by Jakob Heller of Frankfurt to paint a large altarpiece for a new church. The Heller Altarpiece was the second commission of the printer since his training in Venice, Italy (1504-1507) to paint like an Italian master. In order to prepare for such a commission, Dürer spent over a year creating drawings of black ink and white chalk on blue Venetian paper to serve as inspiration for the large painting. However once the painting was complete, the artist held onto these ink and chalk drawings as part of his personal collection of art. It is from this group of drawings, that the now iconic Betende Hände had its start. Today the image of two praying hands is appropriated for posters, pins, headstones, and even tattoos. The original context as a personal drawing kept by the artist, Albrecht Dürer, is completely divorced from its contemporary use. It is thesis's argument that Betende Hände was not only a very personal drawing for Dürer, but also a moment of self-fashioning, metaphorical experimentation, and abstract self-portraiture. Rather than simply representing prayer, Dürer's Betende Hände captures his desire to become like unto Christ. The composition appears simple, but upon further inspection reveals a unique quality and form borrowed from the Gothic architecture of the German Hallenkirche. The fingers extend vertically like rib vaults from the palms only to touch at the points giving the hands an overall triangular composition. With this drawing, Dürer experimented with his metaphorical self beyond any other point in his career, and becomes like Christ. Only the form of Christ that Dürer choose after which to fashion himself was the architectural form of Christ or the Gothic Church. Therefore this thesis will trace the emergence of Dürer's metaphor of body as architecture via the cultural environment of pre-Reformation Germany and popular religious texts that related the body of the worshipper to the church form. As a result, Betende Hände gives unique insight into the identity of a Catholic Dürer.

Adolescence is a time of maturation, integration of selves, and, in the modern age, digital performance on social media. Conflicts in the identity vs. role confusion stage of Eriksonian development are addressed throughout this research, although the existing literature rarely connects them to online trends. A qualitative survey, sent to high school students, explores the tension between self-doubt and the desire to be seen. Responses indicate that teens who post on social media are attempting to make sense of their formative years via the reactions of this networked world. Certain participants show resistance to the phenomenon of the Selfie, implying that some adolescents may view it as merely a passing fad. Participants’ contradictory attitudes concerning social media and the Selfie reflect the four most recurrent themes: duality, insecurity, freedom of expression, and the communication gap between adolescents and adults.