Rjpark – Looking Outwards 10

Body on Screen by Claudia Hart

The woman I’ve decided to focus on is Claudia Hart and her project, Body on Screen. Claudia Hart has worked on both contemporary art and 3D animation and has taught both of those for a really long time. She’s taken classes at New York University’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications to learn Maya 3D animation software and she’s attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She states that her main focus as a female artist in a high-end technology industry, is to, “subvert earlier dichotomies of woman and nature pitted against a civilized, “scientific” and masculine world of technology”. And you can clearly see that in her project, Body on Screen.

Hart was inspired by Trisha Brown, a American postmodern dancer who challenged the dance tradition that focused on formalistic beauty of the body and stylized move. Brown emphasized pedestrian movements and de-highlighted the “feminine” features of a dancer’s body. Similar to Brown, Hart portrays women in a simple way by drawing their bodies with sagging breast, rocky hairs, frozen-looking body, and characterless face, which accentuates their physical agility in regards to the choreography rather than their erotic quality. By doing this, she desexualizes women and presents them at face value. Furthermore, she allows people to understand womens’ representation issues, whether or not they’re specific to the digital practice. And as a female, this is something that I think is important to present to the world and that is why I admire her project.

Claudia Hart