Hi All!
I’m Cathleen Parra and I’m so excited to be a part of this years Wonder Women Residency.
Bio:
I’m a photographer living in Jersey City, NJ. I’ve studied Photography & Media Arts at Parsons The New School For Design and New Jersey City University. My work deals heavily with gender roles, female sexuality, what is deemed as social or sexual norms, childhood, and the media/ our perception of media as children in forming the adults we become. I have explored these topics through mediums of photography, video art, interactive installation and mixed media. Over the past few years I have exhibited work throughout the country and internationally. In addition to my fine art work I have has also written for Posture Magazine, an online arts & culture LGBT magazine based in New York City and worked on music video sets managing production design.
You can view more of my work at www.cathleenparra.com
Photographic Work
Childhood Project
The images I made for this project are staged recreations of my childhood memories. The series deals with issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and the lifelong imprint left on a child from their family’s dynamic. I felt is was very important to use people I was very close to as models so that I could create a safe space to relive these memories. This also strengthened the bond between my models and I. It was a bond my childhood had led me to believe I wasn’t capable of.
I photographed with the intention of the characters lacking an identity. My reason for this is that I wanted not only to photograph in a way that mimics a visual memory, but I also wanted the photos to be accessible by the viewer. Working on this project has enabled me to cope with my past while further strengthening my bond with the people in my present. It is my hope that this project will present itself as an honest story both making the viewer uncomfortable with its blunt straightforward approach, and inviting them its universality on the topic of adolescence.
Lego Project
Through out this project I interacted with models that have had sexual experiences in public outdoor spaces. This series forced the models and therefore forces the viewer to confront behavior that is usually hidden for fear of one being considered a sexual deviant. I consider the act of sex in a public and/or outdoor space to be a common, although lesser form of exhibitionism. It is something a majority of people have done, but don’t normally disclose. Censorship and the proscribed sexual norms that are engrained in our heads from childhood are the foundation of this project.
I was also aware of media representation of gender when I framed each shot. In the film industry, the most dismal rating for a film is an NC-17 rating. This rating surpasses the R rating. Once a film is rated NC -17, its promotional outlets are limited, if at all existent. Films that depict or reference certain aspects of the female orgasm are more likely to receive this rating. Meanwhile the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is more lenient in portraying or referencing male sexuality and/or nudity.
On the MPAA website the NC -17 rating is defined as “in the view of the Rating Board, most parents would consider patently too adult for their children… rating can be based on violence, sex, aberrational behavior”. Ultimately this inspired me to frame my images of women from the waist up while keeping males framed from the waist down. The Lego genitalia replicas worn by each model addresses the pixilation of body parts that is often rendered in television. Using Legos as a material was a playful way for me to reference our culture’s relationship to censorship, and our own body, beginning in childhood.
The Exquisite Truth
Body positive activism has become a topic of discussion due to recent media exposure. The importance of this empowering movement is that it has presented the option for women to own and embrace their body types. Body positivity has put an emphasis on the real bodies of real everyday women, an image too often neglected in popular culture. In turn offering a diversified image of how we view women within our culture. The Exquisite Truth is a series of self portrait diptychs in which I explore the idea of body positivity with myself.
I began studying perspectives of other women who write about the experience of being an over weight woman in a society that thrives on size obsession. I too had found myself succumbing to the obsession. Upon reading pieces on body positivity I realized how much respect I gained for these women. Women, who did not let a cultures disapproving eyes dictate what they wore and how they viewed, loved or respected themselves. Many of her images seek to expose what it looks like when a woman not of a glamourized clothing size is photographed in wardrobe that popular media normally reserves for unrealistic, retouched “super model” body types, such as bikini’s, lingerie and halter tops.
The Exquisite Truth presents an imperfect body that is capable of sensuality and sexuality, two powerful naturally human attributes that such a body type would lack in mainstream media. This series is a reclamation of self.
Video Work
Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome
The manic pixie dream girl is a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin. Rabin assigned meaning to this phrase, and describes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”. The Manic pixie is a character who never grows. Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome is a video series I’m working on which depicts the degradation of women who have been placed upon the unreachable pedestal of the manic pixie dream girl trope, and the consequences of not meeting such unrealistic standards. La Douleur in english translates as The Exquisite Pain. This video serves as a documentation into the downward spiral of the degradation of the girl. Original music and haiku by Laura Fisher. Additional Philadelphia footage by Anrei Degenhardt.
Skeleton Army- Production Design Work
Original Proposal:
The idea of a super food in our contemporary society is a notion of a food that exists beyond nature, mystical and powerful more so than anything we have ever known. Mass media has advertised “super foods” as the quick and easy cure. Of course it is usually a tampered with “super food” that they are trying to sell. When in actuality, the super food in nature is simply food. We’ve removed ourselves some far from natural food, that the idea of natural food unprocessed itself has become a luxury. My proposal for this residency is to either create mock advertisements or appropriate and distort
already existing super food advertisements potentially in the form of video installation.
Or installation of psychical mock advertised packages. Preferably I would like to work with this idea in video, although working with a psychical and video installation is also an option.
Over the past week I’ve given my proposal some thought and have decided to do an experimental video piece exploring food, added ingredients in food through dance, the use of split screen juxtaposing dance with food and close ups of what is deemed “superfood” and/or recent fads in food. I’m titling the video ‘Osmosis’ in reference to the idea of the superfood as magic, one can absorb the power of the super food through osmosis.
Stylistic & intellectual links of inspiration:
