ARTIST STATEMENT

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Lily Perry’s artistic practice focusses on feminist and psychoanalytic methodologies; where the portrayal of femininity throughout popular culture, art history and social media is explored through ‘performalist’ self portraits, which are then manipulated and hyperbolised through the use of photoshop in order to humiliate Male Gaze theory via the imagery of the grotesque and the carnivalesque. Perry uses drag techniques, various props and fancy dress accordingly, to perform as a plethora of ‘characters’ who’s appearance hyperbolise versions of femininity. Photoshop is then used to extort the external physique of these characters to immense proportions, to subvert the imagery of the Male Gaze. By seducing the viewer through familiarity, Perry forces them to comprehend a saturated reality of the objectification of women in patriarchal society. Perry’s work seeks not only to question the depiction and objectification of women and idealised femininity, but to also question the female-on-female gaze that women have come to impose upon them selves. 
Consequently, Perry finds herself with a fascination of the power of the male gaze, in that it has subsequently embedded itself into the subconscious of the female mind, resulting in women objecting themselves. Perry purposefully objectifies herself as the artist, questioning how the unconscious of capitalist, patriarchal society has enforced women to objectify themselves through the leitmotif of idealised femininity.