May she. Have hear. Birds.

What you are looking at

A woman's head and shoulders appear against a flat field of pale sky blue. Her hair is a glossy, salon-styled blond with pinkish highlights, the kind seen in fashion photography. But her face is gone.

Over it, and spreading down across her neck and shoulders, are jagged fragments of black-and-white printed imagery, cream paper tones and patches of red, pink and dark green, torn and smeared so that they streak sideways like a corrupted digital file or a poster ripped from a wall. Similar ragged shards float in the blue around her. Fragments of skin, a lip, a red garment surface between the tears.

The work is large, 238.8 × 177.8 cm, so the head is many times life size.

How it was made

Josephine Meckseper made the work in acrylic and inkjet on linen. The method combines mechanical and hand processes: printed imagery, drawn from advertising, fashion and news photography, is transferred to linen with an inkjet printer, then painted over and interrupted with acrylic. The horizontal smearing and tearing suggest both the décollage of postwar French artists, who peeled layers of street posters, and the glitches of screens and scanners.

The title

The title reads like a broken sentence, or words reassembled from a cut-up text: May she. Have hear. Birds. The grammar fails in the same way the image does. It hints at a wish or blessing that cannot quite be spoken, and perhaps at listening, "hear," where seeing has been blocked.

Josephine Meckseper

Meckseper, born in 1964 in Lilienthal near Bremen, Germany, grew up near the Worpswede artists' colony and has worked in New York for decades. She is best known for vitrines and installations that arrange consumer goods, political imagery and protest material like store displays, examining how advertising and ideology use the same visual language. Her work often takes the glossy female image of fashion photography and disrupts it.

Meaning

Read in that context, the erased face is a statement about the commercial image of women: an ideal assembled from hair, skin and styling that, once torn open, has nothing individual underneath. The violence of the tearing is in tension with the calm blue and the pretty hair. It can feel like vandalism, like censorship, or like a person refusing to be looked at.

Related works

See other works by the artist in the catalogue: Scene VI, Afrikan Spir, Masculine Feminine and Filmtract Nº1, and her artist page.