a dot red

Christa Blackwood began her career creating street installation art on gender and identity issues, landing her an early invitation from Kiki Smith and Lucy Lippard to join the Women’s Action Coalition. This inclination toward subversion of traditional gender politics is apparent in Blackwood’s most recent series of photographs included in this exhibition, Naked Lady: a dot red, The Boys of Collodion, and Girl. Blackwood employs a red sphere in each composition to indicate female presence. In Naked Lady, a red dot inserts itself into the grandiose tradition of male landscape photography. The Boys of Collodion flips the stereotypical artist/model relationship so that the female artist is photographing the idealized young male figure. And with Girl, Blackwood literalizes the faceless torso of a young woman within a pink circle. The red dot as symbol contains multi levels of female signification. In the context of landscape and portraiture created using historical photographic processes—the photogravure and wet collodion tintype processes—the simplified red “dot” creates a contemporary portal for examining our conditioned perspectives of gender, history, and the image.

Blackwood is an Austin, TX-based artist whose work has been exhibited internationally, featured in The New York Times and the Chicago Sun Times, and collected widely including with the Center of Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO and Xavier University, New Orleans, LA.