At a Distance
By Heidi Stetzer
In these portraits of imagined women, I grapple with the tension of being on display yet not wishing to be seen at all. Images of the female form are easily found and digested, but by obscuring or abstracting a portion of their features I place total consumption out of reach while also generalizing them past the point of becoming a symbol. I have sourced reference material from a mixture of AI generators, stock images, and artwork from academic artists of the 19th century, creating further distance between myself and my subject. Each portrait is also an experiment to better understand the continuum of consumption; this work is a search for answers to the contradictory nature of my love of painting the female form and the discomfort of contributing to a visual culture that values digestible, comfortable aesthetics.
