Thelma Van Rensburg @ artavita

Thelma Van Rensburg

Thelma van Rensburg was born in Pretoria, South-Africa in 1969. She has studied and travelled extensively. The artist has always had an interest in art, but did not pursue it as a career until 2000.. She has a B.A Hons. Degree in Physical education and Psychology. In 2004 she decided to study art full time and received her B.Tech/ Honours degree in 2007 and majored in Printmaking and Painting. Her thesis focused on the Postmodern Identity, which she passed with distinction

My work deals with the Gaze,thus woman being the object of the gaze of men.
This also refers to the seminal book of John Berger Way’s of seeing in which he states:

"Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of.
Berger further solidifies this relationship of the power of presence of men and women by drawing on the interpretation of the presence of women. "A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

Portfolio:

Grrrls and pin-ups

Pin-up: That which is affixed to a board or wall for scrutiny or
perusal; specifically, a clipping or photograph, usually of an
attractive young woman
With the industrial revolution and its explosion of massreproductive
print technology and the rise of a formidable
middle class in America and Europe to purchase them, the pinup
genre emerged to both negotiate a space for itself between
the fine and popular arts and define itself through the
representation of a pointedly contemporary female sexuality.
The pin-up is a genre associated with mass production,
distribution, and consumption, meant for (at least limited)
visibility to more than one viewer. As an image where
explicitly contemporary femininity and implicit sexuality are
both synthesized and intended for wide circulation and public
display, the pin up itself is an interesting paradox. It represents
a space in which a self -possessed female sexuality is not only
imaged but also deemed as appropriate for exhibition.
The pin-up in feminist context is constructed as an icon of the
paradoxical that also stand for the pleasurable.
By subverting stereotypical images of woman I aim to remake
the pin-up much as Cyndi Sherman, Madonna and other artists
in the 1970s and 1980s. My intention is to appropriate the pinup
as has been done by woman since its inception more than a
century ago for their own empowerment.