Independent Study Project, 2006: Bottom, Top, and all of them installed in a cubic frame I built. Quark spins as colorful femoids with weapons.
- she/it
- bruesselbach.com/
Mainly using this to chost a #retrospective of my artwork from the last uh 3 decades. Occasionally new art and rechosts. Pretend I put some fun gifs here.
An independent study senior year project from RISD 2006: Each of these figures, 3x3ft in oils, is the personification of a quark spin. More of the nude women with weapons trope! These are Up, Down, Strange, and Charmed. With the final, massiest and most exotic two they fit into a cubic frame.
It's another Ripa valence flip! There's a lot of mystique to this one - technically I have all the elements of the personification - wool clothing and wolf's feet, performing charity while looking away. But there's a lot of weirdness with the way representation works trying to represent the concept as well. The book she is holding is actually Ripa's Iconographia itself. There's some spotlight hyper-baroque lighting going on and I don't even know what the decorative edges are about but that landscape in the background is just a reference to Girl In Landscape by Lethem for some reason. I must have been thinking about how contradictory morality is the only way to live and what matters is that good is done regardless of faith. But for sure "charity" as a stratified institution is an emblem of lived hypocrisy, so this is more about liberalism than like, the kind of gotcha arguments liberals think will work on the right wing. Anyway this lives with a buddy now and I have no idea where he put it.
2005 Another personification interpreting Ripa's Iconographia, modeled by my great aunt Margot and a fish I painted live and separately then cooked terribly. There is a lot of weirdness with Ripa for sure. Like this "Idleness" is I think supposed to be a negative thing, but I'm in favor of letting old ladies rest, you know? And also old (and, according to the canon, disabled) ladies work so hard, come on.