The Medusa Project: Collective Female Subjectivity in Articulated Image and Words

This presentation shares and explores “The Medusa Project,” a transdisciplinary collaboration between a painter and a scholar. Drawing from intersectional feminist history, material culture, psychoanalysis, and communication theory, the Medusa Project is a collection of paintings paired with mini-essays exploring collective female subjectivity. Each pair focuses on a word representing an archetype or slang expression for womanhood. Most of the words are historical and outdated, such as “Gunpowder” and “Hedgecreeper,” while others have more resonance in the contemporary world, such as “Bluestocking” and “Sapphist.”

As an interplay of form and narrative, the articulation of imagery and words serves as an invitation to think pluralistically about gender. The series identifies words that have animated collective female identity across history, contexts, and difference, evoking fantasies of liberation as well as fantasies of gender itself. Through the frame of the Medusa myth, the series thinks through concepts of the gaze, power, resistance, joy, and dissonance. The relationship between language and imagery is meant to be evocative rather than didactic, and exploratory rather than definitive. Goals for the presentation include exploring the relationship between words and image, connecting histories of gender with the contemporary world, considering the ways art challenges the gender binary, and contributing to the building of coalitional and intersectional feminist art.