Mickalene Thomas

The dazzling, disorienting photographs, rhinestone-encrusted canvases and shimmering porcelain figurines of Mickalene Thomas comprise a world of cultural aesthetic absolutes taken to their logical extremes. As Thomas pushes these amplified visual tropes beyond their tipping points, she allows the women in her images to wrest control back from their decorative trappings in a way that feels like a liberation for both subject and viewer.

Artist Kara Walker explains it best:

…Mickalene Thomas’s chocolate-colored sisters with statuesque thighs, supple flesh, and meandering hair announce the promise of womanist agency. The space-age domestics or mother Africa soul searchers of her odalisque photos are draped over sofas and swathed in layers of contrasting “exotic” prints—a porn trope as much as it was a fact of ’70s interior design. Thomas’s bodies begin as substrata, canvases to a libidinal urge reminiscent of depictions of the Other in early photography and pornography (and, in turn, historical photographs’ mimicry of Western painting traditions). But, while relying on the familiar arrangements of white-male painting tradition, Thomas allows her photographic compositions to spiral inward, away from the superficial tropes of exotica, toward the complex sexuality of her models.

Via Bomb Magazine.