What do you do with an evening? Do you spend hours online with all your buds, looking up pr0n and cooking up steaks? Or watch prime time television rom-coms (or porn), wishing they were really starring you and your friends? Sir or madam, you really need to get out this Friday evening, and get a dose of the real world.
Gillian King, 24, and Kara Passey, 23, don’t mind that their art might be a little hard to digest.
“Most of my work is about personal experiences that people don’t want to talk about,” says Passey, “like being in an abusive relationship, or just having body image issues. People think that you just need to shut up about it. But, why? These are problems that people should be discussing.”
The two women have even found some resistance from their families to support the topics they tackle: Passey paints nude and semi-nude and portraits of herself and her friends, and King portrays female bodies melded together with factory-farmed animals, which has been an active feminist observation since Carol Adams’ 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat.
King says, “I’ve been a vegan since July last year, and a long-time vegetarian before that. As a woman and a vegan, I’m really interested in those similarities.” She says that she is getting more comfortable with the concept of feminism as she learns more about it, and she can relate it to her animal rights politics. “I think animals are very oppressed, and hopefully in the future, that will change,” says King, “and people will view them in a different way and not something to be slaughtered or taken advantage of or tortured. And women throughout history have been taken advantage of.”
In her abstract paintings, King draws from slaughterhouse pictures and feminine images. Racks of dead lambs and dead chickens are nearly indistinguishable from vaginas and long legs.
Passey says, “I like the idea that I’ve made paintings that have made people turn to me and say that they could connect with it because they had similar problems. It just doesn’t make sense to me to keep things quiet, when talking about it could end up helping somebody.”
Passey is inspired by the idea of thrusting private emotions into the public eye, and by the relationships between specific people. She also says that those inspirations have recently included feminism, sexuality, and performative gender. And while much of Passey’s work involves showing off the beauty in everyone’s bodies, (like her nude self-portrait which graced the cover of The Manitoban, and the portrait of her boyfriend above) one of her new works is focused on the gluttonous: she dipped 12 cheeseburgers in wax. “I preserved these cheeseburgers in wax and it was symbolic of this person I had dated. I was like, ‘What was something about him that really disgusted me?’ And it was the amount of McDonald’s he ate.”
But the two are excited for their opening this Friday at the Edge Gallery, where they will being having a vegan potluck starting at 7 p.m. As Passey coolly put it to King, “Our colour palettes are going to look awesome together.”