“Who owns [the female body]? What does that mean? …begin challenging the way that we look at art versus the way that we look at human beings” — Allen
If you enter Cool Beans to grab an afternoon coffee, waiting in line with you will be a vibrant triptych of the female form. As you find a place to sit, you may cozy up by stark black sketches of a hauntingly familiar—yet distant—woman’s face.
This rumination on femininity and the body is the work of Stephanie Allen, a senior in Drawing and English at the University of South Carolina (UofSC). Active in the art community, Allen has served as an intern for the Columbia Museum of Art and The Jasper Project as well as edited for The Daily Gamecock. A previous participant in juried and group exhibitions, this is her first solo show.
Allen is a South Carolina native, having spent her childhood in Charleston before moving to Columbia to attend UofSC. In the past three years, she has experimented with various styles and mediums, and as she grows into herself as an artist, she finds herself circling around questions of gender and connections between the exterior and interior self, based specifically on perceptions of the female body.
This show is rooted in these questions and presents a journey through the work Allen has created during undergrad, mostly in the past 2 years. The selected pieces are mostly in her two preferred mediums: oil painting and India ink sketches, the latter of which she uses a bamboo stick to create.
“Oil is so vibrant and saturated, and it also takes much longer to dry, so I'm able to take my time and really work through both the colors and the piece as a whole,” Allen reflects, “When it comes to ink, I like that the drawings are very transparent in that I can't hide when I mess up. There's no erasing, there's no going over—you have to be able to work with mistakes.”
In terms of her evolving style and what she has grown into, Allen finds herself leaning more towards the abstract even though realism is what she most often explored in her early years. Though all the pieces in the show are clearly bodies, they may not always be “realistic” or even show the full body—faces are rarely a part of Allen’s work.
“Hands are something that I’ve begun to do a lot of. Hands have a capacity to be very emotive, but in a way that’s still anonymous,” Allen explains, “When you see a face emoting, and you're wondering, ‘What is that person thinking about?’, hands still have that and can be evocative in a very similar way without you immediately wondering, ‘Who is that person?’ It gives a much broader definition that takes the focus away from a singular experience.”
Whereas the feminine form in body or hand allows for an experience that relies less on identity and more on message, two pieces in the show are sketches of a female face. “I think it's the eyes that make it,” Allen says in relation to their bridge between anonymity and identity. The faces, while clearly faces, being sketched over in ink so many times makes them appear both distinctly human yet somewhat inhuman and monstrous at the same time.
Sitting in this interstitial space between the real and imagined, both as a woman who teaches women’s fitness classes and as an artist who perceives the female body, Allen has had to reckon with her own mindset about women’s bodies, even her own.
“I think one of the things that I have to try to remember is that there is a gear shift. When I look at drawings or paintings or the feminine form, it’s easy to say, ‘This is art and something beautiful,’” Allen effuses, “But then you see those in real time, and they tend to judge and pinpoint imperfections that simply aren't there. The body is the art, and the body is the person, which is so much more pertinent.”
With a collection of past work on display, Allen turns her focus to her Honors Thesis and Senior Show, which will expand on these same themes but with a focus on queer women and non-binary people and their relationships with their bodies and femininity.
“It's going to be an interview-based series, where I interview a subject about their relationship with their body,” Allen divulges, “Then I'll have them pose for me or send a picture of their body for me to sketch. I'm not planning on doing faces in this either.”
Though it’s still months away, Allen is considering layering the art with realistic drawings based on the individuals’ photographs in the background and abstract paintings derived from the interview responses on plexiglass hanging in front.
Whether you encounter Allen’s work at Cool Beans or her Senior Show this spring, she hopes you’ll ponder the following: “I hope my work leads to questioning of how we perceive the female form. Who owns it? What does that mean? And then, in that perspective, I hope others begin challenging the way that we look at art versus the way that we look at human beings.”
Allen’s show will be up until Sunday, October 3rd. Cool Beans, located at 1217 College Street, is open weekdays from 7a - 10p and weekends from 9a - 10p.