Artist Statement & Resume

Local Girl Artist Statement:

This new body of work is comprised entirely of self portraits that seek to explore skin as a visual record of experience.

RESUME:

Invisible College, group show, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN
Zg Summer MMXV, group show,  Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL
With Love from No Coast, group show, curated by Josef Zimmerman, 1975 gallery, Rochester, NY
Zg Winter group show,  Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL

Zg Summer Show,  Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL
Fast Forward: Rewind: Play, "Not or, But and,"  group show, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL
Empty Kingdom, group show,  111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco, CA
The Beautiful, group show, Wm. Rolland Gallery of F.A., CA Lutheran Univ., Thousand Oaks, CA
Fort Side Story, group show, Artlink Contemporary Art Gallery, Ft. Wayne, IN
Zg Winter, Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL
Exhibiting artist with Empty Kingdom, Select Art Fair, Miami, FL

Zg 10th Anniversary Show,  Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL

Art Prize 2011, Open Concept Gallery, Grand Rapids, MI

New City, "My Top Art Picks for Chicago and the Midwest 2013", by Pedro Velez, p.10, 12/19/13
Art Ltd. Magazine, "Chicago Pulse"  September 2013, pg. 86, illustrated
VisualArtSource.com, "Amanda Elizabeth Joseph" by Robin Dluzen, Sept. 13, 2013
Chicago Tribune, "Pick of the Week: 'Cheap $kin$" Arts & Entertainment, Sect. 5, 9/9/13, illustrated
Fort Wayne Reader, "Triple Force: Art Stars in the Making," by Dan Swartz, July 18m 2013

EmptyKingdom.com, "Interview with Amanda Elizabeth Joseph," by Slim Cognito, April 12, 2012
Juxtapoz.com, "The Works of Amanda Elizabeth Joseph," April, 2012

RAISE magazine, “Yummy” issue, Featured Artist

My recent work seeks to explore the intersection of class, race, and gender through the lens of “white trash,” which can be best understood as a complex set of social representations. Placed within varying and often ambiguous backdrops, the female subjects of the works I create are accompanied by carefully chosen objects and articles of clothing that subtly speak to a codification of our bodies, our identities, and our environments based on our level of access. Each image begins by establishing an environment and choosing a model to occupy it, providing her with props and a role to play and then photographing the resulting mediation between fact and fiction. These images are informed both by research and by personal experience, culminating in portraits of young women that explore the intricately woven relationship between one’s class, race, and gender in America. 

It is with great effort that I choose to construct the images in this manner versus strictly documenting the actual circumstances as a way to assert that our understanding of others based on their class standing is just that – constructed. I aim to appropriate stereotypes that arise from often unacknowledged class anxieties and the typically negative psychological perceptions of working class women, particularly within the arena of whiteness. The act of painting physically renders the photographed images in a painstakingly hyper-realistic manner that takes what could be one of a thousand incidental photographs encountered on a daily basis and elevates it to another level, that of fine art. This depicts a marginalized group of people in a “high culture” form that traditionally only represents the middle and upper classes. Painting, as a medium, has a rich and tactile physicality which emphasizes the flesh and form of my subjects, drawing from Jeffrey A Brown’s argument that “cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body."