Unstable Entity

Unstable Entity uses photographs and architectural constructs to explore balancing and tipping points within culturally unstable expectations of female strength, resilience, and bodily performance.

Unstable Entity uses photographs and architectural constructs to explore balancing and tipping points within culturally unstable expectations of female strength, resilience, and bodily performance.  The work compares physical bodily forms to ad-hoc assemblages that are tenuously balanced using common building materials.  Within this juxtaposition is a meditation on the unsettled standards of what it means to be a “strong woman” and the structures that often fail us. The collage of forms speculates on the relationship of female strength to intimidation, sexuality, and desire and the individual stamina required to pursue both mental and physical wellness.  Female body builders enter the work as a form of archetype or idealized body representing a maximized performance of strength and physicality.  The artist’s performances pursue stamina, wavering balance, and the labor associated with managing the collision of roles between being the subject and operator of the photograph.  The work is a montage of layered priorities alongside feverish persistence to perform to meet the standards of contemporary femininity. The work speaks to the performative nature of strength, the precarious temporality of the “ideal,” and the psychological safety of inhabiting and being present in a body.

Rebecca Drolen (b. 1983) is an artist and educator working in Arkansas. Her photographs are concerned with how individuals visually assemble their identity and the constructed ideals placed on gendered bodily performance. Her work playfully explores the expansive nature of photography in contemporary art as it incorporates built spaces, assemblage and performance.