What is Monstress?
It’s my name for a certain mode of thinking I use to stay optimistic, productive, and as close to sane as our times allow.
Back in 1996 I was studying to be a Mistress of Printmaking, making all sorts of stuff, and figuring out what the term “artist” actually meant to me. At that point I had been a printmaker for four years and had fallen deeply in love with silkscreen and relief printing. The cheapness of production, the immediacy of results--it was amazing. Print has this inherent legitimacy to it, a whole political history that I could but adore. Plus I could actually afford the materials and still have money for food.
I was growing restless with the diaristic imagery I was making—all this work about my specific life, all these images that were secret code for growing pains. I thought more and more about reaching out to a larger audience with a broader message to get more perspective on life. This would thereby enrich all my efforts and maybe make the world a slightly better place.
I studied propaganda, advertising methods, packaging traditions, and western product design. It seemed logical to learn the most pervasive means of spreading ideas in our culture in order to disperse a few of my own. I moved on to Utopian theories, confidence games, placebo studies, and good old optical illusions in an effort to find ways to grab attention for quiet messages that would never stand a chance otherwise.
The Products
The Monstress™ line of products is an attempt to address the woes of modern living. I am still struggling to draw a line between the Monstress Work and my personal art work, and I have been fully incapable of promoting the products sensibly. I’ve made about $2000 in 20 years of making them. I either give them away or find they’ve been stolen, a mixed compliment at best.
The Logo
The logo stands for my nearest approximation of (for lack of a better term) the soul: before we have eyes trained to see the world we are born into, we exist. Before we have words, we ourselves are indescribable, and as such we can be anything. I believe that reinscribable iota lives within everyone, thus meaning we can change our perspectives and our selves radically up to our dying breath.
The Name
It’s in the feminine because I think the Feminine has been a lot less codified on important levels than the Masculine. That lack of definition is room to move through, over, and under. You live a lot more fully when you have no idea what you are supposed to be and can only be whatever you actually are. Get in touch with your feminine side, ladies and gents. Not only could you find it liberating, you may find it has some teeth.
The Point
I try to reference this ever-shifting possibility I know exists even in our over mediated, pre-fab, money grubbin’ scheme of things. The irony is that I work from a fully enculturated position within a frame of reference I may never fully escape.
Call it hope, call it overreading, call it bullshit if you must.
I call it Monstress Productions.
