mixed media, collage

“Having the opportunity to explore the SOS Art Retrospective artworks really helped me build the idea for my piece because the works that I looked at were all dealing with super huge issues, most of which have been easily forgotten. This made me think of an idea to show sexism since that is something that everyone knows exists but it still is forgotten or swept under the rug sometimes. I wanted to highlight that idea that things like this can be extremely widely known and people will still forget it exists.
Though this topic is something that everyone knows about, I still managed to learn a lot about it. My research of different sexist news headlines made me realize that women are still being objectified in the news. I also looked at some headlines about celebrity men and their headlines were nowhere near as focused on clothes or pointless things, they were all focused on their accomplishments rather than what they were wearing when they went to the store earlier that day. I also learned just how bad the pink tax still is. There are ridiculous differences in price of everyday things for men compared to the same product, but aimed towards women. As most people probably know, women also are still not receiving the same pay that men get for the same exact work.
I came up with this idea from some of the artworks I saw in the SOS Art Retrospective exhibition. There was one that was about the pink tax and that work along with some others that were about different topics led me to create the artwork that I ended up creating. After I had the idea of sexism in my mind, I looked at the other artworks with different eyes and I saw some ideas that I wanted to use to get the idea across that I wanted to.
First, I collaged news headlines that showed sexism as the background of my work. I did this because people tend to not notice articles like this and the fact that they are mostly made about women while men get praised for their accomplishments. Some of these articles were talking about female celebrities wearing baggy clothes after giving birth to their child instead of congratulating them on their new baby. I then pasted things that have ink tax on them over those news headlines in order to also convey that women aren’t just objectified, they also are being forced to pay more for everyday items just because they are aimed towards women. Lastly, I painted two eyeballs, two mouths, and an ear and crossed them out in red to show how these things tend to be overlooked, not talked about, and some people just pretend they don’t hear things like this happening.
The overall message I wanted to communicate was that sexism still exists. Not only does it still exist, but it has been forgotten about and a lot of the things happening such as women’s products costing more than men’s and women not getting paid the same as men for the same work needs to be talked about and taken seriously. Things like this affect our living and make it harder to get by just because we are women. I wanted to bring awareness to this since it is definitely a problem people overlook.”