MUD WOMAN | Fay Ray | June 13 – August 22, 2015 | press release
ABOUT
Baik Art presents an outdoor wall work by Los Angeles artist Fay Ray who, for this project, shares her passion for clay and ceramics by producing new meaning for the term Mud Women.
Fay Ray’s work teems with vital unconventional values that focus on conditions of the female body. Her photographs, collages, and sculptures have unassuming visual cues that are positioned between fashion and nature, and sometimes even pleasure and horror. When Ray’s images and ideas are discovered, we find an untroubled spirit at their core in artworks that contain views on strength, injustice, and intellect. On first observation, there seems to be no direct link to personal struggle, however on second read, the artist’s bond to rebellion and self-respect begin to appear.
ARTIST
FAY RAY
Realised in three mediums – collage, painting and sculpture – Fay Ray’s work considers ideas about the female body. Black and white photomontage hue closest to her early Dada collages. Ray gathers ordinary objects often within her home and with textures that interest her, which she then photographs, configuring their torn fragments into black and white composites.
She explores the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochrome photomontages. Her works are inspired by fashion shoots and surrealist collages. Ray fragments glamorous signifiers into sensuous shapes, taking animal skin, diamanté, fishnet, and reflective surfaces, and pasting them together with images of hands, hair, and feet. The status of objects is also spotlighted in Ray’s three dimensional works; Intimacy (2012) combines natural forms with manmade materials, featuring conch shells—which could be mistaken for tongues—embedded in Hydrocal plaster. Ray’s hanging sculptures recall weighted dream catchers with their crystals, palm sheaths, and silver chains.
