Chris Pontello

Idealizing Innocence: Lisa Yuskavage’s Process of Free Association  Lisa Yuskavage’s artwork consists of highly sexualized, but seemingly innocent, subjects with exaggerated anatomy and suggestive positioning. Her work leads some critics to accuse Yuskavage as pandering to the male gaze and thus continuing the history of objectification of the female figure. However, Yuskavage admits that despite being aware that the viewer will perceive her subjects as “sex machines” she is also “trying to include how they feel about their own predicament.” This is best explored through a process of free association, a process of one word or image spontaneously suggesting another without any apparent connection, which is what Yuskavage uses throughout the evolution of creating her work Triptych, 2011. In an interview with Monica De La Torre she admits that she likes to reach into the unknown to figure out where the painting is going, explaining further that, “I put the canvases up on ...

73 rd and Lowe, Englewood, Chicago; August, 12 th 1963. Photo Credit: Gordon Qu inn and Jerry Temamer of the Chicago Tribune. Bernie Sanders was arrested for resisting arrest during a public-school segregation protest on August 12 th , 1963, at age 21. He was protesting in response to the Chicago school board putting black students from overcrowded schools into trailer classrooms to avoid moving them to adjacent underutilized white schools. Martin Luther King was inspired to come to Chicago in 1966, which was the first northern expansion of his protests in the south, because of the success of Chicago’s school desegregation demonstrations in 1963-1965. Senator Bernie Sanders was arrested within a summer when one hundred and fifty-nine other protestors were also arrested, but only four were fined, including Sanders. The penalty was $25, which equates to $202.73 today. He was one of the few signaled out because he acted in a position of leadership, instigating the prote...

During my final critique for last quarter I realized that my body of work holds strength even without a literal narrative. The happening that my subjects were a part of is a drop in the bucket of my core intention, togetherness. This nebulous aesthetic, that results from my spray paint technique, drives this sense of togetherness by-means-of an analogy of the scientific reality that we all come from space dust. Nebulas, or molecular clouds, hold everything needed to give birth to stars, planets, and eco-systems. We are not separate from the cosmos but instead a part of it, as we are also a part of each other. Doesn't it seem serendipitously fitting that when looking at the variety of beautiful colors, shapes and textures within the deep space photos depicting molecular clouds, galaxies and distant stars that one can not help but feel something along the scope of love? This realization is at least a launching point to pursue the unknown qualities waiting to be resolved in this body ...

This series of drawings shows my teeter totter between representational figurative work and non objective. I forced using certain subjects in the beginning that did not truly convey the aesthetic quality that I was striving for. I was inspired by illustrators who use crosshatching techniques with a variety of cool and warm pens to create an illusion on form and depth. Through extensive experimentation I realized that a back drop in this similar techniques had similar results.  This first piece shows the frailty of the process. Another factor to this series is the learning curve considering attempting to master any new medium. The images following are the most resolved and the ones after show the disambiguation of the transition from representational to non.