As an artistic medium, collage’s links with rebellion, anti-conservatism and feminism are deep rooted – American collage artist Miriam Schapiro went so far as to call it “feminage”. By cutting up and splicing fragments lifted from different sources together, collage reveals the hypocrisies of gender, race and class pervasive in societal and mass media representations. Even today, artists continue to make radical statements through the process of juxtaposing elements of found matter – with the exception that it is more likely to happen with the click of a mouse rather than with glue and a pair of scissors.
Through the Instagram account @scientwehst, a 27-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist (who would prefer to remain anonymous) continues in the bold tradition of cut and paste subversion. Where Hannah Höch might have stuck a few pairs of be-Nyloned dancer legs onto her revolutionary compositions, it’s safe to say that those of @scientwehst are a good deal more sexy. Her digital collages consist of snapshots of elegant architectural structures suggestively placed over images of naked women pulled from porn and glamour magazines. While these are definitely NSFW, they are making a provocative statement about female sexuality and bodies in the hypocritical era of gendered social media censorship.
The artist wholeheartedly agrees that her collages are rebellious. “Definitely! I started making them as an act of solidarity when the #freethenipple movement started on social media a few years back”, she confirms. “A lot of my friends and people in the community were speaking out against the censorship of women’s bodies. My collages were created to be a part of that conversation, to challenge Instagram’s community guidelines. It was definitely a ‘fuck you’”, she asserts.
@scientwehst mash-ups are already making waves and last year, her work was included in a group exhibition of emerging female artists at the Museum of Sex in New York entitled, “NSFW: Female Gaze“. Individual collages — as well as her entire account — have been removed from Instagram for violating community standards. Of this, the artist says: “I was confused, of course. None of the images I posted I considered offensive according to the guidelines”.Yet @scientwehst continues fighting the good fight.
Much like her feminage forebears, @scientwehst considers her work to be feminist too. “My collages work against the male gaze, which I feel is a facet to feminism. The nude areas that I overlay with architecture are typically sexualised by men. If we replace the body with a bridge, or the interior of a museum, for example, you end up sexualising the object and not the subject.”
And why architecture? “It wasn’t premeditated, it actually happened naturally. Initially, when I started creating these collages, I was looking for anything that remotely looked like a woman’s curvature. I believe it was a curved hallway that sparked my interest to solely use architecture”, the artist explains. “There are many similarities between the places we inhabit and our bodies”. The result is whip-smart satirical collage that fuses the organic with the inorganic, challenging the frustrating double-standards of the internet age.