Les Femmes by Isabella Rinald at Whippersnapper
Photo by Meagan Viken @mvikenexperimental.
For many young artists, gallery spaces can feel intimidating; they’re a place you aspire to see your art, but it can feel like an uphill battle against gatekeeping, racism, homophobia, and sexism to make that dream a reality. Luckily, many independent galleries and arts spaces in cities across the country are giving young artists more opportunities to share their work with the world.
This month, Whippersnapper, a gallery and event space in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle, will host Les Femmes, a body of work by Isabella Rinald, a Bachelor of Fine Arts student at Cornish College of the Arts. According to their website, Whippersnapper seeks to provide a safe space for artists who have either never shown their work or are new to sharing their work in the art world.
Photo by Meagan Viken @mvikenexperimental.
Rinald, a 20-year-old artist originally from Fort Myers, Florida, said Les Femmes is a hyper-feminine collection of paintings that seeks to reclaim the femininity that has been weaponized against many people personally and within media and pop culture.
Receiving her first set of paints at 10-years-old, Rinald said she grew up around art and artists. Ronald said her grandmother was a painter and collage artist and her grandfather was a musician, and both her mother and father were interested in collecting art.
Photo by Meagan Viken @mvikenexperimental.
Rinald said she drew inspiration from the mid-century aesthetic, fashion and imagery from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, French new wave film and iconic celebrities like Brigitte Bardot, Cher and Madonna.
“Les Femmes is about taking my idols and the images that surrounded me as a young girl that I wanted to be so badly and allowing them to be consumed under a female perspective,” Rinald said.
“I wanted them to be desexualized and empowered. I wanted to make art about celebrities in a way that was respectful of my idols.”
A commentary on the way femininity is devalued and simultaneously sexualized by male creators, Les Femmes seeks to disrupt this dichotomy by recreating images of strong, sexual and beautiful women from Rinald’s point of view.
Photo by Meagan Viken @mvikenexperimental.
“These can be consumed as just paintings of women. But what is deeper is the fact that they're painted by a woman who's experienced objectification. It's taking the male gaze out of the situation,” Rinald said.
Using a monochromatic palette of vibrant pinks and dusty blues mixed with black and grey shadows, Rinald’s painting’s explore themes of pop culture, the death of girlhood, objectification and the sexualization of women.
“I wanted it to look like candy. I wanted it to feel fleshy and hot and flushed, but in a way that only a person who's experienced that sexualization could understand skin feeling and looking like that,” Rinald said.
Photo by Meagan Viken @mvikenexperimental.
Les Femmes will be on display at Whippersnapper every Saturday of November from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Follow Whippersnapper and Isabella Rinald for more information on when and where you can engage with their work and the work of other young artists.