PAST EXHIBITION

June 7 — July 20, 2019

Zoe Schwartz earned a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Michigan in 2016, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude. Zoe works in a variety of media to create an immersive and accessible experience for her audience, including sculpting, drawing, painting, and printmaking. Intrigued by the effects of gender in art, she analyzes and critiques the depictions and objectifications of female bodies by the male gaze in current media and art history. As a result, her art attempts to give validity to femininity and lies at the intersection of romance, intimacy, sex, gender, and race.

As a feminist artist who primarily depicts the female form, Zoe strives to create art that does not objectify her subjects. She uses traditional and male dominated materials to depict unapologetically feminine objects as an act of empowerment. Post college, Zoe began working at the New York Art Foundry where she casted her own bronze sculptures. The process is long and labor intensive: burning skin on scolding wax, carrying heavy ceramic shells, and sweating over molten bronze. Through the act of processing sculptures into bronze, Zoe began thinking about the gendering of art media and the prevalent  misogyny in art/art spaces; historically, female artists have been pushed out of these traditionally male spaces. She focuses on the question, “What does it mean to be a woman-identifying artist performing ‘masculine’ bronze casting?”. In response, Zoe created a(R)mor, a series of brassieres, underwear and accessories cast in bronze. The historically masculine medium is paired with feminine objects to create a tense and humorous juxtaposition. These dense delicates attempt to tackle the complexities of femininity by reflecting and subverting age, sexuality, and gender. They have many symbolic interpretations. Underwear is both a form of oppression and self expression rendering this body of work both a critique and celebration of constructed femininity.

ZOE SCHWARTZ’S WORK