Joyce Neimanas’ art is a vibrant hybrid of photography and found object skillfully combined through digital manipulation. "Whatever It Takes," an exhibition at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, displays a selection of her work from 1976 to the present. She will speak at a reception Tuesday, March 8, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The show will be on display in the lower gallery of the museum until March 20.
Neimanas worked at the number one ranked School of the Arts Institute of Chicago prior to joining UNM’s Art & Art History faculty last August. Her work has been exhibited in more than 25 one person shows and 100 group shows.
Neimanas juxtaposes images and objects to highlight issues of appearance, gender and sexual stereotypes and individual identity. She shifts meaning through context. The objects in her work “exist in the world,” Neimanas said. “It’s just because I take them out of the world and put them next to each other that changes each one. So they’re not what they were, and yet they still are.” Process plays a central role in Neimanas’ work. Her art invites viewers to become part of that process.
The show’s earliest work, “Untitled” from the 1976 portfolio Underware, is a deceptively simple black and white photograph combined with handwritten text in red ink. From a distance, the photograph shows a scantily clad woman, her head and lower leg outside the frame. As one approaches near enough to read the text—a statement on female fantasy—the image abstracts to an interplay of shadow and light reminiscent of pointillism.
The selections from the 1990s increase in apparent complexity. “Facial Muscles,” from the 1996 series Sample, combines images highlighting beauty myths. A diagram of a mechanical device leads the eye into ads for a firming and toning “facial band” and “cream bleach” for body and facial hair. These set up the intriguing center of the piece, a photograph with a seemingly hairless woman wearing only black underwear, sunglasses and the facial band. Behind her sits a figure covered in white clothing with her/his face scratched out. The juxtaposition suggests the erasure of the body, or perhaps of the unaltered or un-beautified body. Pictured (left) are three images of a medieval pair that tie the piece to the long history of altering the body to conform to beauty norms.
While found object art played a role in her earlier work, in the 2004 series Comparisons it takes center stage. In found object art, objects “become transformed not by the lenses but by the placement of them next to each other,” Neimanas said. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re on two-dimensional surfDavid Brookshire or three-dimensional surfDavid Brookshire; the same thing will happen.”
“Fondle” juxtaposes two objects, a braid of brown hair tied off with ribbons and a braided leather whip. As the title of the series suggests, the art is in the comparison. The piece’s very simplicity opens a wealth of reflection on the meaning of femininity.
Contact: Sari Krosinsky, (505) 277-5813