Bakery Brawl: New Artist Statement

Detail from Bakery Brawl, 36"x48", oil on canvas, 2010.
To view and order prints of the full painting,
visit my website: www.meganvangroll.com

I've revised my artist statement to account for the new direction my work has taken since beginning Bakery Brawl in 2009. It now contains a paragraph describing the process of creating the painting from multiple image sources, and the conceptual elements of this piece that mark new directions in my work.
Here it is in full:

ARTIST STATEMENT
I'm fascinated by the obsessive, erotic, and somewhat dark role of food in the female consciousness. Despite its existence as an everyday and seemingly passive part of our lives, food -- particularly comfort or 'guilty pleasure' food -- is a loaded cultural symbol, embodying pleasure and nourishment as well as shame. This love/hate, crave/fear, indulgence/abstinence dichotomy parallels and flirts with the role of sexuality, highlighting the disconnect between the raw, corporeal aspects of our humanity and culture's expectations of gender roles and performance.

In a personal investigation of these gendered expectations, I have occasionally turned the focus onto my own body, most notably in a 2007-2008 series of nude self portraits staged in contextually inappropriate environments, such as public spaces. Painting my own image from photographs taken without assistance was a private attempt to autonomously reinvent and reclaim my self-identity from the patriarchal archetypes I had internalized as a woman. In this way, the image of my body in these nude self portraits serves as a metaphor for a personal inner dialogue about gender and identity.

My most recent painting, Bakery Brawl, is the first of a new series and marks a deviation from my earlier work with the use of multiple subjects. Bakery Brawl is a double self-portrait comprised of approximately fifteen different reference images. Using a grainy found image of two prostitutes at the beginning of an altercation, I recreated this dynamic pose with several reference images of myself, taken over the course of a year and combined on canvas into two figures. The framework and details for the stylized bakery display case are also sourced from multiple photographs, and I often hybridized some of the baked goods by combining elements from two or three different photographs. The result is a stylized, highly visceral narrative vignette - two women who both are me and aren't me. This oil painting marks the expansion of my artistic focus from the personal to the interpersonal, exploring identity construction within the framework of female relationships and communities.