"Cut-out"

Multidisciplinary artist Dickson Beall premieres a single-channel video titled "Cut-Out". In this 90 second video created in 2009, Dickson Beall employs transparent layers of moving images and sound to reveal cultural reflections of beauty contrasted with anti-glamorous realities in the world concerning female identity and the female body. The video begins with an image of the iconic Venus of Willendorf and rapidly flows to other recognizable depictions of Venus by Botticelli, Titian and Rubens. The pages unfold through historical highlights leading to contemporary portrayals of the female form by Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, Renee Cox and Shirin Neshat among others. All the while, in the video background, an ambiguous figure wields a power saw cutting through sculpture material with a loud, pulsating buzz. The long blade of the saw comes in and out of sync with uncensored bodily images, such as Courbet's Origin of the World and Jenny Saville's Branded, to suggest incomprehensible violence. Other moments offer contrasting views of female power in mythological proportion. In the video, transparencies, distortions, and fragments of beauty reveal hidden content both pleasurable and unpleasant, horrifying and hopeful. In this art about art, a picture of strength and power plays out, by women and men, through images of women that construct an ongoing cultural lineage of complex perceptions.

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