Artist Statement

All You Hear is a Body is a multimedia project exploring the censorship and oppression of women by power structures in current day North America based on the objectification of their bodies. No matter how intensely a woman demands to be heard, the systems that are put in place to oppress her force her into silence. Society has effectively been trained to view women as objects of sexual desire, nothing more than visual pleasure; most certainly not voices of any importance. With this project, I wanted to explore that constant frustration of being a body first while also highlighting the current issues women are desperately fighting for so that they may not continue to be ignored in favour of visual pleasure.

To do this, I used CDs and recorded short monologues of myself verbally exploring each core issue I wanted to address: the justice gap in the judicial system, the censorship of women in the online space, the revocation of rights for trans women, the double standards held against female protesters, and the removal of reproductive healthcare by government systems. After burning the audio onto the discs, I used a permanent marker to write quotes from the dominant patriarchal narrative onto the data side: effectively censoring and augmenting the voice of the female through the overarching voice of the patriarchy. As well, I took individual portrait studies of my own body parts and created collage pieces. By separating parts of the body from their external context and collaging them together, a new type of objectification is created. The viewer is asked to study the collection of parts as their baseline forms, essentially turning them into objects outside of traditional sexualization.

This project stands as a stepping stone in feminine resistance, forcing the viewer to put themselves in this constricting state of submission while also asking them to go forth and listen for these voices that continue to be talked over.