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Agnès Varda
Agnès’ style, which would permeate throughout her films, exhibits what Roy Armes called a “balance between the personal and the political, the theatrical and the documentary”, and earned Agnès the title of “godmother of French New Wave”.
Chocolat (1988)
Through a series of concentrated memories, Claire relies on the “visual rather than verbal” and uses small gestures and mise-en-scène to highlight the underlying tensions between France’s family, their servants, and their white guests. Placing France’s family in a hidden, remote outpost, Claire captures the unspoken longings and inner conflicts of the characters through their intimate and routinely interactions in the lonely sub-Saharan grasslands.
Emerging Creative: Sarhely Morales
Deana Lawson
Deana, who would often find strangers in the street to photograph, stylises a regal quality to everyday people and their homes. Playing into the themes of family, love and desire, she offers viewers an intimate glance into the lives of those photographed. However, “familiarity doesn’t equate to access”. In their raw state of representation, Deana’s subjects maintain a sense of self-composure, that remind the viewer that they are lucky to be allowed a glimpse into their homes.
House Of Mirth
House of Mirth serves as a kind of prosecuting homage to the stifling and repressive society Edith grew up in, describing the coercive limitations on the women of her generation. The heroine Lily Bart, an Old Family socialite thrown into poverty, struggles with the desire to luxuriate in the pleasures of the wealthy, against her self-enforced inability to marry a wealthy man, the only escape from her family’s economic fall from grace
Inventing Modern Art In Brazil
A pioneer of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila was born in a small countryside town in the state of Sao Paulo to a family of coffee plantation owners. Studying painting and sculpture in Brazil, she moved to Paris in 1920 to attend the Académie Julian. At the Academy, she would study under Cubist figures André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger, to undergo what she would call a “military service in Cubism”, a technique that would come to characterise her vibrant and “sensuous” landscapes.
bell hooks
Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell was raised in a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Growing up in segregated schools, bell would read Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes and William Wordsworth. Once the South became desegregated in the 60s, bell’s adolescence was framed by the violence and upheaval she faced from her predominantly white teachers and peers.
Sedmikrásky (Daisies)
Described by Vera as a "philosophical documentary in the form of a farce", Daisies was banned by the government upon its release in 1966 until 1967. Her most controversial film, Daisies takes on a satirical tone as it follows two girls named Marie, who agree that since the world is spoiled, they will be spoiled too. They then embark on a series of mischievous pranks, leaving bills to older male suitors in humiliating dates, getting drunk at a dance hall and upstaging the main dancers, and parading on a dinner table as catwalk. Gluttonous and selfish, they use food and sex to fuel their hedonistic tendencies and satisfy their anarchic whims.
Sarah Moon: About Colour
As portrayed in her About Colour’ Exhibition, Sarah seldom showed the entire figure in her work, leaving the face often hidden or cropped out, to portray a sense of mystery and ethereality, often photographing the models from the back, as if they belonged to some transitory, transitional place or a fragment of a memory. In these compositions, she aimed for the women to convey both strength and fragility. Blurring, unusual cropping, scratches and distortions gave them an almost painterly aspect, often taken using Polaroid positive/negative film
A Spy in The House of Love
Like Anaïs, Sabina grapples with the feelings of guilt in deceiving her loving husband, while also finding some incitement in the cycles of passion and deceit, calling herself an “international spy in the house of love”. Drifting between realism and surrealism, Anaïs offers a poetic narration of Sabina’s despair in living out a piece of herself with each man, and her innermost desire to wield this pieces together and find a man could love all parts of her.
Shirin Neshat
Today, our Woman of the Week is Shirin Neshat!
Born in Qazvin, Iran, Shirin is a visual artist known for her extensive photography, film and video work exploring notions of gender, identity and society.
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany
Born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany, Hannah first began taking glass design and graphic art classes at the college of Applied Arts in Berlin in 1912, before dropping out during the outbreak of WWI in 1914. She worked at Red Cross in her hometown before returning to study art in Berlin in 1915, where she met artist and writer Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement. The group was composed of mostly male artists, who satirized and critiqued German culture and society during the crumbling Weimar republic era after WWI.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Our book for this week is “My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Croatian Mother and Iranian Father, Ottessa earned her BA in English from Barnard College and her MFA in Literary Arts in Brown.
Her writing style is characterized by her ability to portray lowlife characters taken with an innately pessimistic outlook on wider society, in the style of one of her influence’s, Charles Bukowski.
Play It As It Lays
As she published her first non-fiction book “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, a collection of essays of her experiences in California, Joan began to gain prominence as a writer and began to mingle with the last actors and musicians of Hollywood’s Golden Age; which came to an abrupt halt after Tate-La Bianca murders, carried out by Charles Manson’s followers.
Maya Angelou
Welcome to The Piece Palette, a new vision and literary platform formed for women creatives to learn and thrive 💫
In celebration of Black History Month, our first ever Woman of the Week is Maya Angelou !
Most known for her poetry, civil rights activism and autobiographies, Maya worked several odd jobs to support her son before she rose to fame.
Marie Colvin
Happy International Woman’s Day! Our Woman of the Week for today is Marie Colvin!
Born and raised in Queens, Marie Colvin is known for her extensive foreign affairs coverage for The Sunday Times. From 1985 until her death in 2012, Marie worked as a war correspondent in Libya (where she was the first to interview Muammar Gaddafi after the after Operation El Dorado Canyon), Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Egypt, Palestine and Iraq.
Nomadland
Although last weekend marked the end of the Cannes Film Festival, our first ever film post for today is Nomadland, the film that won Chloé Zhao the Academy Award for Best Director, making her the second woman and first woman of colour to do so.
Born in Beijing, Chloé went to school in Brighton and LA before deciding to study Politics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. However, her time studying politics made her disillusioned with it, and she decided to take her passion of learning people’s stories to pursue filmmaking, her college minor.
The Yanomami Struggle
Our film photography post for today is the Yanonami collection by Claudia Andujar.
Born in Switzerland to Jewish and Protestant parents, Andujar fled Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War after her father and the rest of his family died in the Holocaust. After studying Humanities at Hunter College in New York City, she moved to Brazil in 1955 to pursue photojournalism.
the infinity mirror rooms
In honour of Yayoi Kusama’s birthday this week, our art piece for today is her Infinity Mirror Rooms!
Born in Matsumoto, rural Japan, Yayoi started drawing pumpkins in middle school and creating artwork from her hallucinations. Growing up in an abusive household, Yayoi would often experience intense visions of flowers, flashes of lights and dots. These would later influence her artwork where she channeled her traumatic childhood, and her experience growing up during war time.
The Kitchen Table Series
Our film photography piece for today is “The Kitchen Table Series” by Carrie Wae Meems. While she originally studied dance, Carrie turned to photography while being a union organiser for the labour movement, for which she had originally intended to use her camera for. However, she decided to take up artistic photography after reading the “The Black Photography Annual, a book dedicated to displaying African American photographers.