The PEN15 Bit
This body of work consists of paintings and wearable sculptures that are performed and documented in video form. While the paintings’ materiality remains traditional, the sculptures are assemblage pieces formed from institutionally gendered pieces of clothing. Pants tailored for men are sewn to possess a third pant-leg made from a pair of women’s jeans, merging the binary opposites into one wearable object. Similarly, Hodes uses pantyhose, the medium of choice by gender critic and artist Sarah Lucas, to maintain inherent femininity in her sculptures while opposing it through the phallic forms that the tights possess. Choosing gender-specific clothing to make up pieces that are physically unnerving, grotesque, and oppositional comments on the fluidity of constructed gender and its malleability through clothing.
Visually, the artist utilizes the exaggeration of color, form, and physicality to insert aspects of humor into her work. The characters in her paintings are a physical expression of their surrounding environments, acting as exact embodiments of oddly specific scenarios. Her use of color draws emphasis on the absurdity of her figure’s worlds and contributes to the whimsical aspects of her environments. Combining this with the androgynous form and the suggestion of gender, she presents satirical reflections on the effects of binarism that are too accurate to ignore.
The central artwork in the installation titled Man’s World: We’re Just Living in It is a narrative short film that follows three teenage girls’ evening excitement as they anticipate their favorite band’s new music video. The band’s new release ‘My World’ evokes energetic and erotic responses from the teens, resulting in the girls’ eventual possession by Man’s World and their recession into a ringing telephone. Materially, this piece contains altered found-object media that resemble merchandise from the Man’s World (MW) band. The MW character is a physical embodiment of the forms rendered in Hodes’ paintings and maintains her complex yet humorous markings, namely the Big Red Boot and Pegleg. The MW costume is a combination of men’s pants and women’s tights, found ski boots, and a stray microphone. The assemblage aspect of this work reflects Hodes’ sculptural concepts of de-gendering gendered clothing and serves as a commentary on the fetishization of women as sexual objects. The young girls’ infatuation with MW pokes fun at the male gaze and its consequences: men, if you ever objectify a woman, you will be transformed into an inanimate object whose only purpose is to be ignored.