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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2020-12-06 at 9.40.59 PM.png media/Screen Shot 2020-12-06 at 9.40.59 PM.png 2020-10-14T22:04:04+00:00 Lucy McKenzie's Calendar 3 10 By: Angel Kaneb plain 2020-12-07T06:23:00+00:00
       Lucy McKenzie is an artist whose work is as part of an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Arts. Her art, Calendar 3, fit the criteria set by director John R. Lane in 1987 “to promote recent work by both emerging and established artists that has not been given wide attention…” McKenzie’s work is part of an instillation called New Work. It was created in 2007 and it’s a drawing using “colored pencils and watercolor on paper.”
  
       Calendar 3 contains three figure that are all vertical and take up a third of the art piece each which is set on a white background. Looking from left to right the first figure faces to the right. The female figure’s body is made up of three main part. The head which contains hair that is straight and pushed behind the back. The next part is from the neck down to the knees. She is wearing a dress like jacket of a green hue. The sleeves are long, and the hands hide in the oversized pockets at her waist. There is a color of a darker green hue that matches a tied belt below the breasts. Below the bottom of her dress lay her legs. She is wearing black high heels and her right foot to the viewer is pointed up at a slight 30-degree angle. The middle figure dead of center is in the forefront. Her body is shifted to the left slightly. She is made up in the same three parts. Her top part is made up of her head which is surrounded in a gray hue hood. Her hair sticks out to the left side of her body to the viewer and down over her chest and continued to the waist. Her middle part of her body is the same dress like jacket as the female figure to the left. Her posture is different. The hood is up, and the matching green hued ribbon is tied around the waist now. Her left hand to the viewer is grasping the left side of her collar and the right arm is bent and her hand lays on her waist. Her bottom part of the body is made up of her legs. She wears the same black heels, and her right leg is slightly bent.
       The female figure on the right is behind the middle female figure because the right arm of the middle figure is in front of her left side. Her body is made up of the same three parts. Her top part, her head with eyes pointed to the right, is covered in a head piece like a hood. The only hair sticking out covers her forehead and seems to be bangs. The hood meets at the neck with a ribbon like necklace matching the same gray hue as the head piece. Her middle part of the body is the same dress as the other female figures yet hers is of a blue hue. Her left hand sticks out of the oversized left pocket at her waist. Her right hand gently caresses her hood at the right. The darked hued blue ribbon is tied at her waist. Her bottom part of the body is made up of her legs. They are facing the left and her feet are also in the same black heels as the others. Her left leg is slightly bend.
       McKenzie’s art yet very simplistic uses modernist ideals similar to females of the modernist era, mostly in regard to meaning behind the piece and the power it gave women. Her unique play by using “appropriation” similar to “Vogue drawings” gives a message about women and fashion that adds to New Art. More specifically the message connected to the art is a new way of looking into a societal norm that sexualizes and makes women feel like they constantly have to catch up. What is special about New Art is that there is no looking for just men or women artist rather those who have not been given the limelight and have something special to give back to society. There are no gender specifications and no mention of anyone who identifies as transgendered. There seemed to be a well-balanced number of men and women in the exhibition. Although the exhibition was not about gender or those related topics it rekindled appropriation which is using someone else’s similar art style and was brought back by some artists both male and female to make a statement often about societal views on people especially women. So, in a way McKenzie’s work connects to those other artists who chose to do likewise and who all started their careers New Work.
       McKenzie has a line called at Atelier E.B that sells clothing with some avant-garde aspects. The clothes are not using new patterns or design rather they challenge women to be different in the way they present themselves while wearing the clothes. This similar thinking led Lucy McKenzie to create a whole set of calendars and which one woman is wearing clothes in different styles of the 20th Century. As a viewer and reader behind her work you get a sense that she represents society. In the brochure that accompanies her work it is said in each work “the model’s physiognomy and body are represented differently-her appearance is controlled by the hand of the artist and the dictates of the stylistic mode appropriated”. Her goal was to show that “personal appearance” is “unfixed and malleable”. The reason for the choosing of Calendar Three is the fact that there are three different women in the painting wearing similar clothes but in different ways. Upon reading further McKenzie states that all of the models are the same person. She wanted to play with the fact that the “markets impact on the environments and object we encounter remain a paramount importance in understanding our conventions of social status and self-definition.” Mackenzie wants us to see how you should be able to see how you fit into society and how fashion does not change who you are as a person, but that is how society views this aspect of life.
       She chose to only have women as the models in the photo and she paints/draws them a little slightly different way in each one, but I think she makes a stand on women that has not really been talked about in others works about her. Women in history have always been looked at for the way they dress, and it was not until artists like Sonia Delaunay or Susan Valadon who started to challenge society and depict women in a new light. Women were allowed to be their own moneymakers and have leisure time and smoke a cigarette like Valadon’s The Blue Room. McKenzie uses in an industrial approach regarding clothes that this industry is not just about “nature of wealth and elite culture” but also in the way it makes people feel by trying to look a certain way to entertain others. Women are constantly seen as more fashionable then men and society has putt stereotype aspect to them that they need to look a certain way and have the newest clothes. McKenzie chose this by showing a simplistic drawing, but ones that change with clothing and the way she wants painted the same woman’s body in different body types. In a way she is society, and the drawing represents the person and how they are stuck in this constant loop of making sure you stay up to date with the newest fashion trends that change constantly. Her art is new, and it fits perfectly with the way this exhibition is supposed to be as a viewer because it gets you thinking, and it is depicted in a unique way that makes some kind of stance on something. Her work has meaning and power and that’s the kind of artist that they look for in this exhibition. The museum looks for just that and does not seem to look for a certain gender but looks at the overall picture of what that stands for as an artist trying to make their way and McKenzie did a very good job in doing.