Miranda Maynard is an artist currently based in Athens, Georgia. She will be receiving her MFA from the University of Georgia and relocating to Los Angeles this spring. Her multidisciplinary work has been shown in Miami, Chicago and throughout the southeast, and will be exhibited in New York this summer. In 2012 she was an artist-in-residence at Artist Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE). She is the co-founder of the Asheville Darkroom, a public not-for-profit darkroom and photographic education space in Asheville, NC. This summer she will be teaching at The Black Mountain School, an educational residency in western North Carolina developed in the style of Black Mountain College. Today we share a selection of images from her thesis work, Sellable Work, as well as installation shots of an exhibition that is currently on display at the UGA museum.
In “Sellable Work,” I defend popular culture as a valid, political realm from which broad cultural and ideological changes (or the lack thereof) are discernible. As a political space, I mine popular culture for it’s many sites of complex feminist contradictions. Is it radical for Kim Kardashian and Hillary Clinton to identify as feminists when so few public women do? In these works I problematize the Left’s disregard for Kardashian-feminism, while maintaining an awareness of what it lacks. The pieces both disrupt and parrot the commodification of politics. In them, I weigh the consequences of settling for piecemeal neoliberal feminist representations, in part by making such representations myself.
To view more of Miranda’s work, please visit her website.