| UNTITELED Performance/video, 2016 This untitled performance/video, I build and manipulate the landscape around me, performing a monotonous and undefined task before revealing the purpose of the action. The final shot reveals the "birth" of the jade egg. This product, the jade egg, or yoni egg, was made famous after being touted as a healing and muscle building product on Goop, Gwyneth Platrow's lifestyle blog. As a woman in her late thirties, I became concerned about fertility and thought more about whether or not I wanted to conceive a child. This performance took place during this time of questioning and searching. It is a personal reflection and cultural criticism on the ways sexuality and health are marketed and sold to women in the United States. Criticism of this produce was swift from gynecologists and those who tried it. The idea that this product, which implies there is something wrong with your vagina or that it is weak, is somehow empowering is part of a broader issue with the way these products are sold to women. The egg and the form of the egg become fodder for my work as I use the object not as it was intended but as a metaphor for fertility and birth.(Rachelle Beaudoin) |
RACHELLE BEAUDOIN US Rachelle Beaudoin is an artist who uses video, wearables, and performance to explore feminist identity within popular culture. She attended the College of the Holy Cross and holds a Master's degree in Digital+Media from Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited at Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance Goldsmiths London UK, the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, Low Lives 3 and Itinerant Festival of International Performance Art, Queens NY. She was a Spring 2013 Artist-in-Residence at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, CO. She was a Fulbright artist-in-residence at quartier21 in Vienna, Austria in 2014. In 2015, she was a Clowes Fund Fellow at Vermont Studio Center. She currently teaches at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. |