Emily Carrig | Sleeping Beauty

Emily Carrig’s work takes an unapologetically feminine perspective, positioning itself in opposition to objectifying portrayals of women’s bodies. Her paintings transform the traditionally passive feminine subject into an active agent of self-exploration. Treating the female form as a terrain where the thoughts and feelings of a woman may be expressed, Carrig seeks to convey her internal world through a vocabulary of images drawn from landscape paintings, film stills, and her imagination.

In Sleeping Beauty, a woman is shown in a posture of contemplation with her features obscured by shadow. The work is one of a larger series of works that all depict the same figure; yet, subtle shifts in the works’ compositions indicate gradual changes within the subject’s internal landscape as the series progresses.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight. — John Berger

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@elimy_rue