The Unrepresentable: Art & Sexual Violence

Vision in the Unrepresentable
By: Tinna Savini, MFA
Unrepresentable: (Adj.) not capable of being represented.
Origin: mid-17th century from un + representable
(Oxford English dictionaries online)
The Unrepresentable: Art and Sexual Violence is the second art exhibition, organized
by the CSU Stanislaus Feminists’ Equality Club, in which students, faculty, and exhibitors
once again joined their voices with many other campuses, institutions, organizations,
survivors, and activists whose purpose is to raise awareness of the sexual violence too
painfully frequent in global society. As the exhibition title suggests, most of the works shown
in “Unrepresentable” attempt to picture those things we are not capable of representing or
comprehending with respect to the inhumanity connected to sexual assault and violence. In
the show we see visualized some of the solipsistic pathologies that can lead a person to so
disengage and to violate the reality of another person as to cause her/him physical violence
or psychological harm. Although the truth of such realities exists in life and in images, this
exhibition also speaks of the resilience of individual voices and collectively of images that
seed hope in the potentially cathartic effect of giving form to experience. In this way, these
efforts are not mere reportage of the meanness too often felt in our culture; rather, they
bring to consciousness a culture more humane and based on the realization of respect and
kindness toward ourselves and all other beings with whom we share this planet.
Many of the works visually reveal the intimate content of pain, fear, and suffering.
Images of bruised faces and hands, absent gazes, uncomfortably close touches from hands
not one’s own, blood, and exposed women’s bodies align with the broader theme addressing
the issues of violence and sexual assault in our society. These images show that violence,
sexual assault, and the ignorance of societal attitudes that attend such aggressions leave the
raw emotions of personal experiences unattended like free radicals waiting to congregate
into a cancer. The eruption of negative emotions and the violence that often attends them
are common enough that we need little explanation for some works. In one photograph by
Brentt Wong, Love Note (2017), we see two small pictures of a beautiful young woman’s
face set above a note with a few clearly legible handwritten sentences. We know that the
scrap of paper with text commenting on her appearance has actually been a precursor to
her assault. If we have any doubt, we need only look at the visual evidence of the large
black-and-blue bruising that her eye shows us. We know that the pictures of her taken
frontally and in profile are the kinds of views that are taken during a police report or clinical
examination. We shake our heads with the familiarity of knowing for ourselves, or from
someone close to us, that this is a custom so often passed down and too long tolerated. In
another image by Hayley Simon, Medusa (2017), we see the closed composition of a nude
female figure whose posture is contracted and whose head sinks between her two crossed
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arms. Her long, wind-blown hair flies up like a Gorgon vision, but instead of a source of
female power, all one can see is sorrow, much like the drawing of the same title by Van Gogh
of his lover Sien Hoornik (1882), slumped in dejected form.
Two works, which both address unwelcome touches, share content and polyptych
form but do not use the same medium. In the first work by Natalie Wadlington entitled Two
Acts (2016), two small, robustly-painted canvasses are juxtaposed, and each provides a
view of Philip Guston-like thin, naked, prickly-haired teenage arms and legs whose genders
appear to be that of a boy and a girl. The mingled body parts between the two images
express the awkwardness of a pressured sexual advance. While in the quadriptych work
by Christopher Benson, Affect/Effect (2017), the medium of the print serves to negate
the intimate warmth of the painterly approach in the first picture, which heightens the
awkwardness and anxiety one feels when looking at it. The repetition of the four pictures
of the same image placed side by side shows a large hand and partial arm touching the
asymmetrically-placed disembodied face of a beautiful young woman. The hand is not that
of the woman; in fact, we see nothing of her body beyond her face. In each of the prints,
her wide-open eyes are somewhat obscured by the clear glasses she wears. Yet the woman
does not seem alive by having her own body or eye function but only by the connection
of the hand to her face. Her realness is reduced to a fetishized memento, which is further
enforced by the smaller images of other young women in collage formed all around her face.
In the top pair, the word “GAZE” handwritten under one image and the word “BLEED” under
the second image of the four images cause one to wonder if we are seeing through the eyes
of a voyeur and/or perpetrator.
The content of some works addresses the more general theme of “Take Back the
Night,” the international event and nonprofit national organization whose mission it is
to make the world a safe enough place for women to walk alone at night without fear of
violence or molestation. In Kolaya Wilson’s Becoming Alive Again (2017), a watercolor image
of a tiny headless female torso with arms in a prayer position is placed at the center of a
larger circle in the middle of a rectangular format. The thin headless figure is not a horror,
but rather reminds one of the headless fertility pendants of prehistoric times. The tiny torso
image beckons us to envision our own heads atop the figure as it sits surrounded by the
curvilinear vines that form a symmetrical tree design. Below this are two triangular shapes
of green as fresh and verdant as the fresh growth of the seed-like center. Above in the upper
third of the image, coming from both the left and right corners and stretching inward, are
sturdy branches with lotus blossoms that compositionally conclude a diamond shape that
focuses the eye once again on the center of the tendril tree and mythic mother torso. This
is a memorable visualization that is like a vehicle we might use to realize a more kind and
conscious culture, free of sexual assault and all that is unpresentable in sexual and other
violence.
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