Beauty and the Breast
Bec LitvanSpace One
11 - 28 Jan 2017
Opening Night Tuesday 10 January 2017, 5-7pm
This exhibition aims to glorify the aesthetics of disfigurement and bodily debilitation in response to the gendered societal shame typically imposed upon breast cancer sufferers. I combine the mediums of painting, sculpture, and photography to evoke the multiform (reflexive, interpersonal, public) marginalisation that’s experienced. The paintings take diptych images of my mother’s double mastectomy scarring and present them as abstracted landscapes whose linearity is illuminated against a voided background. The mastectomy bras replicate – and appropriate – images of graphically animated cancer cells. Finally, the photographs feature my mother modelling the cancer-cell mastectomy bras in high fashion poses.
Image: Bec Litvan, Scarred (1), 2016, acrylic on MDF, 120 x 120 cm