REBECCA DROLEN | FACTORY

REBECCA DROLEN | FACTORY

The factory presents a space where the female body is increased as a means of defense and empowerment through physicality. Hair, nails, and teeth are added to the body, rather than managed or removed. The sets are built to juxtapose the figures’ flesh and vulnerability with textured, repurposed materials.

The spaces appear to be in a state of construction and change, just as the body itself is being reformed and re-identified. The images address the surreal nature of the body at large, constructed appearances, ideal gender performance, and how our physicality can communicate with others. While the work humorously points at the desperation of how women’s bodies are managed and adjusted, it also imagines how multiple female bodies can work together to build each other up.
I question if patriarchal ideas can be dismantled and power can be regained once a body is no longer required to be smaller, hairless, and inherently vulnerable. The work uses photographs, looped video, and small sculptures to explore how the female body can be emboldened rather than reduced.

REBECCA DROLEN

Rebecca Drolen (b. 1983) is an artist and educator working in Arkansas. Her photographs are concerned with how individuals visually assemble their identity – and she is particularly preoccupied with hair. Her work balances built spaces, assemblage, and performance, but the end result is persistently the photograph.
Drolen’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions on a national and international level, within noteworthy venues such as The Huffington Post, Oxford American’s “Eyes on the South,” the Light Factory, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, The Oklahoma State Museum of Art, and the CICA Museum in Gimpo, Korea.
Drolen has had work published in numerous art magazines and blogs and has photographs held in various private collections, as well as the permanent collection at McNeese State University.
Drolen received her MFA in Photography in 2009 from Indiana University. She is an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Photography at the University of Arkansas.

HAIR PIECES

Hair Pieces explores the fickle relationship most have with their body hair. We consider some hair very desirable and grow and groom it with care, while we treat other hair as shameful and cover or remove it. Once the hair has become disconnected from our bodies, we treat it with disgust, yet it has an archival, lasting presence that outlives the body and defies death and decay.
I am interested in the line between the beautiful and the grotesque in our connection with hair.
I am intrigued by the rules that guide our ideas and self-image in relation to our tresses.
In the work, I use photography and the self-portrait as a medium to construct narratives that function both as visual puns and, at times, as social critique.
I hope to use the beautiful alongside the repulsive in these images to tell stories of growth and removal as they examine a surreal relationship between hair and its place.

See the full article in Lens Magzine Edition #133