Behind The Door: Rembrandt Series

The objective of the photographic body of work, Behind the Door, is to challenge patriarchal gender norms and offer a feminist dialogue on sexuality and power. These photographs are an exploration of sexuality, power, death of self, rebirth, and feminine identity through both a Victorian Era and Pictorial aesthetic. In Behind the Door, I relate my own feelings of powerlessness and despair within the suffocating confines of a failing marriage through the reference to the cultural restrictions used to control Victorian women. The photographs play with themes of binary oppositions—light versus dark, life versus death, birth and rebirth, sexuality, femininity, and identity. This identity is one that is teeming with archaic fantasies of power and vulnerability within a culturally divided, patriarchal society. What Behind the Door ultimately reveals is that there are different kinds of strength—the strength to lead, and the strength to follow, the strength to control, and the strength to yield. There are two kinds of power—the power to strip another's soul bare, and the power to stand naked. Images of erotic female sexuality are employed as a means of navigating the fundamentals of representations of power, self, sexuality and what it means to be a woman.