Heartthrob

by Melissa Kay Wilkinson

“My recent series focuses on female bodybuilders from the 1980s, women who embody both defiance and discipline within the rigid expectations of femininity. Through watercolor, I slow down the act of looking, allowing the medium’s transparency and vulnerability to counter the hyper-controlled bodies it depicts. These figures become sites of negotiation—between beauty and power, desire and agency, control and collapse. Repeating disruptions appear across the surfaces like digital glitches, small ruptures that interrupt idealization and mirror the fractures within cultural constructions of gender. I apply an intimate scale in order to resist the monumental treatment often given to subjects of power, instead inviting a quieter, more personal encounter that mirrors my refusal to conform to traditional hierarchies of representation. In revisiting these images, I’m interested in renewing the purpose of portraiture in the twenty-first century: to reflect not only likeness, but the unstable systems of representation that shape how we see bodies, and how we are seen in return.”