Cindy Sherman Amelvis Villafane

Inspired by Untitled Film Stills 

Specifically the one where the woman's under eyes were super dark and tired eyes, and has their hair blown out.  (That one below) 

 The Cindy Sherman Effect 

“And she played it out incredibly, and then she just used that as the stepping-stone to take it further and further and further out. So much of her work is performance, so much is improvisation, so much is theater.”

I liked that rather than it just being a photo of something it was actually something with a lot of life and intense character. In my opinion while it might not always be a “pretty” narrative being told in a portrait it is still an intensive almost eye-catching narrative. 

“The art world was ready for something new, something beyond painting. A group of mostly women happened to be the ones to sort of take that on, partly because they felt excluded from the rest of the [male] art world, and thought, ‘Nobody is playing with photography. Let’s take that as our tool.’” 

The art world and art history spends a lot of time emphasizing art works of men and I like that Cindy’s piece focuses on herself but it's not just portraying herself but also different types of women, social elites, random people in New York City, conventionally unattractive women, etc. She utilized tech and found a way to incorporate what her degree is into a more modern and convenient mode. 

New York Times

“She started dressing up to woo them. “I felt like this straggler that was running after them, saying: ‘Hey, remember me?’ ” she said in a later interview. “ ‘Don’t forget about me!’ It was easy to erase myself and put on somebody else’s face and say, ‘Maybe now you guys will remember me,’ or ‘How about this face or that character?’ ” 

I think that background and obviously “nurture” play a big part in how someone grows into an adult, for Cindy it is interesting to see how she spent a lot of her childhood feeling like an outsider and being apart from everything and it is so prominent in the art work that she creates now. Solo individuals of women are somewhat cut off from society. 

“These are all photographs of subtle rebellions — the first being the demand, of women of a certain age, to be noticed, admired.”

You do notice that unlike her first few artworks, where it's an imitation of Hollywood stills they tend to be the opposite of beautiful refined movie stars, just outlandish, “abnormal” women that are typically aged. It is refreshing to see actual realities in art, not just the regular societal young beauty.