Carol Eisenberg

My art is informed by my lifelong engagement with feminism, particularly the struggle against rigid gender roles. The most obvious example is how my images blur the distinction between painting and photography, resisting conventional notions of what a photograph should be. My visual language is one of layering and collage, a fusion of disparate elements that are simultaneously cohesive and contradictory. Within the same image, surfaces are translucent, opaque, three-dimensional, and flat. Color is used both naturally and expressively. Pictorial content is drawn from the natural environment and the constructed world. My feminist concerns are nowhere more evident than in my engagement with beauty. I have always loved fashion and adornment, but with a feminist lens see the damage inflicted on women by their objectification. While my images embrace the beautiful, they contain marks, scratches, and other forms of disfiguration. Similarly, graffiti and urban detritus appear in my pictures as elements of rebellion and unconventional beauty.