Becky Flanders, “Untitled (from the Archetype series),” 2007, archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist.

Last week in Creative Loafing, I wrote about the work of Becky Flanders, a USF MFA student, whose work I just think is incredibly promising. One of the joys of encountering her photographs - and sculptural pieces as well as a more dialogical/relational aspect of the work that may be emerging - is that they force you to consider a very difficult and - I think, if you are a woman - painful question about the history and ethics of representing women, particularly when the area of representation involves a vagina, clitoris, labia, etc. (The latter two terms, of course, used far less frequently than the catch-all term ‘vagina.’)

I find her images mesmerizing (of course, they’re beautiful) but I think it’s because they stir up in me an unusual cocktail of emotions - revulsion, attraction, shock, embarrassment, pleasure, horror - that are complicated to parse and suggest the even more uncomfortable and confusing query: why do I feel this way?

In sitting down to write something about this paradox (that Flanders’ images are somehow agonizing and wonderful at the same time), I thought it might be best to take a phenomenological approach, i.e., to describe the sensations that I feel in my mind’s eye, as if they were physical, when I encounter her work. And this is what I came up with:

Becky’s photographs force me to travel back into a sort of dark, forgotten corner of my mind where a door opens, as if of its own accord, and is first visible as a small crack of light. Make no mistake: I do not want to go through this door. The hair is standing up on the back of my neck, and I have an uneasy sense of deja vu. (Birth canal, anyone?) As the door swings open, it reveals a room - red and orange, like a caricature of a hellish inferno - where a long row of women sit or stand, extending back into space for as far as I can see. The women are wailing, - horrible, gut-wrenching cries - and some are beating their chests … because they’ve had the misfortune to be born with a vagina. After a few seconds, I feel simultaneously as if I am going to weep and throw up. And then the door slams shut, and I am whisked back to reality.

Fun, right? Have a great rest of the weekend, folks.

Link: Becky Flanders - Creative Loafing