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Queer Femme Fatales Redefine Traditional Portraiture | City of the Seekers

The unlikely subjects include Lorena Bobbitt, who famously sliced off her cheating husband's penis.
Hippolyte, 2016 (Oil on canvas, 61"x49")

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In the late 19th century, Southern California attracted misfits, idealists, and entrepreneurs with few ties to anyone or anything. Swamis, spiritualists, and other self-proclaimed religious authorities quickly made their way out West to forge new faiths. Independent book publishers, motivational speakers, and metaphysical-minded artists and writers then became part of the Los Angeles landscape. City of the Seekers examines how the legacy of this spiritual freedom enables artists to make creative work as part of their practices.

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The internet age is a weird era for realistic portraiture. With the advent of sophisticated digital tools, and a resulting glitched-out, GIF-inspired aesthetic, traditional portrait painting feels old-fashioned. But one artist has figured out a way to revisit history's ubiquitous category of artistic composition with a cast of formidably impressive women, redefining the female archetype in the process.

For figurative realist painter Amanda Jebrón Kirkhuff, the human form is the only subject that can sustain her attention long enough to actually see a piece to completion, a process that can take several months. Her large-scale portraits depict unlikely female subjects, such as Andrea Yates, who killed her five children in a fit of postpartum psychosis, or Lorena Bobbitt, who famously sliced off her cheating husband's penis while he was sleeping. Contemporary tabloid-news narratives like these are balanced by Kirkuhuff’s innovative interpretations of figures from classical mythology, such as Cupid and Hippolyte, whose allegories are re-contextualized through the use of contemporary iconography.

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Jody Lynn Bowman, 2015 (Oil on canvas, 46"x71")

Kirkhuff grinds her own paint and gesso, creating her own media from raw ingredients. But her classical technique doesn't mean she's not conceptual. "My use of traditional materials, scale, and representational technique is a critique of the historical erasure and marginalization of women and queer people in the canon of portraiture and visual art," she tells The Creators Project.

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While Kirkhuff's more serious subject matter is often life-sized, she's also fond of making smaller ink drawings and zines. Because she's not confined by a conscious commitment when creating the smaller works, they have comparatively more levity and humor than her large-scale paintings.

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Jody Lynn Bowman #2, 2013 (Graphite on paper, 33"x50")

Originally from Seattle, Kirkhuff earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and she resided in the Bay Area for ten years before relocating to LA. "There are opportunities here, and there is a culture in LA of respect for art and artists," she says. "If I am grading on an American curve, people take interest in and consume art here in a way that is actually very unique and supportive. There is also space in LA. It still feels very Western; it is a big city, but it has wide open spaces. This is valuable on a practical level, because artists can find places to work, but it's also valuable on a psychic level. I believe one’s ability to conceptualize is influenced by how much physical space they have to do it in. In LA, artists have access to more room to think and work."

Kirkhuff is still negotiating LA's capacity to imbue one's creative philosophy with a personal approach to spirituality. "I am in a continuous negotiation to reconcile my own nihilist tendencies with the drive to create lasting objects," she explains. "Though I appropriate spiritual imagery and some of the traditions of religious paintings in my work, I personally do not express much spirituality. The gay bar is my church. [It's] my place of worship and community congregation. Prop me up beside the jukebox when I die."

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For Kirkhuff, the goal of her work is simple. "I make paintings to document women and queer people’s stories," she says. "My art-making is done in resistance to a history that has scrubbed itself clean of the record of women artists. Having a historical record, influences, and heroes that mirror yourself is a vital social resource. This is why representation is so important. If I can contribute to that through my work, then it will have a larger function. But mostly, I just keep making art to get chicks.”

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Cupid, 2013 (Oil on canvas, 53"x37")

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Limpwristed For Life (The Guitar Player), 2016 (Oil on canvas, 60"x45")

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Andrea Yates (La Llorona), 2011 (Oil on canvas, 39"x36")

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Lorena Bobbitt, 2009 (Oil on panel, 20"x24")

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Hippolyte #2, 2016 (Ink wash, 23”x 31”)

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Waitress, 2011 (Oil on canvas, 49"x58")

Amanda Kirkhuff: Militant Friction is on view at LAST Projects in Hollywood through December 4. Her show at MuzeuMM in Los Angeles opens December 16. Visit the artist's website here.

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