Jana Astanov interviews Naomi Elena Ramirez
CREATRIX Magazine: BEAVER showcases a selection of feminist works from contemporary female artists, the book being an iteration of your curatorial series under the same title, I am curious how it relates to your own art practice?
Naomi Elena Ramirez: BEAVER is an curatorial series that brings together a community of artists whose work divulges, affirms, and explores feminist perspectives on female sexual self-expression, gender performance, and pornography. Beaver is a platform to share these artists’ work and feminist perspectives, and is also a space for creating community and mutual support. BEAVER was inspired by my own eponymous experimental graphic score and dance performance (Beaver, score for one dancer and performance) that explores navigating the conflicting expectations of hypersexuality placed upon women. The concomitant slut shaming and fear of sexual violence querying how those expectations and limitations are imprinted in the discovery or exploration of one’s own sexual pleasure and sexual liberation. This artwork is an embodied exploration of these ideas and questions and presents them without shame. Yet, there is still so much fear or misunderstanding when women present embodied sexuality publicly. After exhibiting and performing the work I felt the need to bring my artwork in context with other artists. Not only to broaden the discussion but also to support myself and other artists making work about female sexuality.
CXM: What inspired you to transform an art exhibition into an art book?
NER: A small independent publisher contacted me about putting together a book after the April 2016 exhibition event. However, once I gave him the first drafts of artwork layouts I realized that I could not work with him, so I decided to do it all independently. It was a difficult situation to go through but I persevered, and ultimately, I think the book has turned out better than it would have.
CXM: Did you structure the book in any particular way? What are the themes that the book explores and how are they intertwined with the contemporary cultural currents?
NER: I wanted the artworks to speak for themselves. This book is really an exhibition in a book. As you would walk through an exhibition you flip the pages of the book. I organized that arch of the book with a loose trajectory from the “what is the fuss all about? The pudenda? The vulva?” through a variety of experiences, complex ruminations, humor, and joy. I organized the artists in the book by means of loose groupings and thru lines of similar focus in the content. Here is the beaver….
After a forward by author Kristen J Sollée and a preface by me, I began the exhibition section of the book with dioramas of vulvas in a garden of sushi grass in the artwork of Michelle Young Lee, merkins of human hair embroidered with epithets given to women in the work of Kate Kretz, female nudes in surreal encounters in the work of Rebecca Sutton, sci-fi kaleidoscopic pornography from Becky Flanders, Tara Booth’s video works jumble images of manipulating the body, erotization of shapes and eating, the body that doesn’t conform. Sexualized racial stereotypes place on Asian women, racist algorithms in search engines, the taboo of menstrual blood in works by Julia Kim Smith. Period sex and dick picks from Bonnie Lane; Feminist porn and portraits of a transwoman in photography by Caroline Dare; inclusive paintings of women with their skirts lifted by Amanda Joy Calobrisi, a bra with annotated with words used to constrict women by Leslie Tucker, romantic love summoning by Damali Abrams, ambiguity of romantic relationships and questions of desire in the work of Keren Moscovitch, sexual fantasies as a mode of self-healing in the work of mothertongues (Kim Ye and Meital Yaniv), the cross-stitching of sexual assault evidence kits and contraception in the work of Katrina Majkut, This is part of our reality, catcalls and cutting in work by Mirabelle Jones, reimagined strip club signs and silhouettes of women as shooting targets in the work of Carol-Anne McFarlane, sexualized racial identities transcribed onto the body in the work of Chanel Matsunami Govreau, and embodied sexualized female representations by Naomi Elena Ramirez.
CXM: Every single artist included in your book carries on a powerful message whether through the use of humour and transgression like Becky Flanders with her Jaguar Dreams, genital mirrored mandalas, Chanel Matsunami Govreau with her retelling of the traditional folk lores, or staging a scene of harassment like Mirabelle Jones in her 8h gallery street trance broadcasting cat calling. Is there a particular project that you would like to focus our attention on?
NER: I think all of the works have important contributions to these feminist questions of embodied experience from our joys, our fears, our struggles to find our autonomy, and insistence that we must talk about taboos and not shame ourselves.
CXM: Please tell me about your own art practice. I saw your performances in the past, and I am curious to what extent the framework of feminism informs your art?
NER: I began as a contemporary dancer and my artwork centers movement, gesture, and embodied experience. As a dancer your body is your medium. Thus, the identities inscribed on the body and embodied experience is present and tangible for the viewer and as an artist as well. At a certain point in my artist life, I began to foray into photography and visual art and thought I was leaving behind my dancing life.
I began to incorporate nudity or nakedness in some of my photographic series: Isolation and a howling is upon us and the earth screams.
The body is fragile but also strong in its integrity. Nudity is used a lot in both contemporary dance and has a long history in visual art. However, as a woman the moment you are nude in your work the societal gender bias becomes a really strong issue to contend with. As a dancer my body is my medium. Yet, It began to feel as if I wasn’t even allowed access to my own body. This began the process of talking about gender bias in my artwork.
Through these works I also realized that I was still dancing, still performing. So, I decide to purposely hybridize my visual art practice with my choreography practice and that is how I began making graphic scores for dance using photo graphic fragments, as I call them, of movements and gestures, then placed on a page in relation to each other. These scores are the performance in simultaneity. And, function as choreography, a score to be read.
CXM: Your project included in the BEAVER book, “The Temptress, Seductress, Other Woman (score)” merges your interest in dance, movement research, feminist theory and porn. You describe it as fictions of desire, can you tell me about your process in regards to creating this large scale, multidisciplinary work?
NER: I began The Temptress by researching imagery, narratives, and academic research on the Temptress, Seductress, and Other Woman tropes in our cultures. Then I took these ideas and inspiration from images and films to create photographic elements which include poses, gestures, and positions related to my research. I wrote text that draws from the research I did from various essays and online narratives which include derogatory names women call other women perceived to be the “other woman”. Then all of these elements, the photographs and text were organized as a score on paper with different sections of the dance read from left to right on a large scale print. With the completed score I stepped into the dance studio and translated the choreography onto my dancing body. At this point I added transitions and speed or stillness, other elements of live performance that don’t exist in the simultaneity of the score. The live performance also includes a voice over of the text with music. The proximity of the performance, the living and breathing body, going through the two-dimensional gestures representing the temptress and then the embodied performance of the physical strain and emotional distress these limited conceptions and labels place on women is part of the work too. Thus, my process of making a graphic score is a choreographic process that is informed by a two-dimensional visual art process and how they relate to each other.
CXM: Experimental graphic scoring, what does it mean?
NER: My graphic scores follow the lineage of experimental graphic scores that began to be used by composers and artists in the mid 20th Century such as John Cage. These scores present the score or choreography in simultaneity as a visual art work. These scores are experimental in that they aren’t exact notation; each reading of the score requires the performer to make decisions and interpret the visual artwork that is the score. This is not an exact notational system such labanotation a form of dance notation that is intended to pass on the choreography as exactly as possible and is created after the live performance is made. In contrast my scores are made prior to completion of the live performance choreography. My scores contain photographic elements of the moving body, gestures and can contain lines, marks, and text.
CXM: What made you conceive the porn poses for the “The Temptress, Seductress, Other Woman (score)”?
NER: Beaver uses poses directly from porn magazines. The Temptress uses poses from images found through internet searches of the words Temptress and Seductress. These kinds of poses are ubiquitous. This work came out of my continued embodied art practice exploring the sexist tropes placed on women. Exploring from body centered perspective as a dancer. I found that one of the taboos that is still accepted by men and women alike is the Other Woman. Why is it that the Other Woman is more responsible for the man’s romantic relationship or marriage than the man is himself? The Other Woman is blamed and shamed but the man is just a man. There are also other assumptions inherent in “The Other Woman”. Monogamy is assumed in the primary relationship. And, the construct also assumes a heterosexual paradigm. Does this trope transfer exactly into same sex relationships? I feel that lived life is much more nuanced and complex than these constructs of the temptress and other woman. The trope of the Temptress says that the temptress makes a man lose control of himself. We can make a connection between the temptress and the slut. Perpetuating the idea that the woman was asking for it because of the way she was dressed. The cultural narrative of the Temptress trope is “She made him lose control”. It’s these labels that confer meaning and hold a threat.
CXM: Cosey Fanni Tutti in her “Art, Sex, Music” explains “I extracted all the images of myself and the associated text from each one – those pages were my ‘action’, to be framed as my work, thereby subverting the ‘male gaze’.” She called her exhibition at ICA in 1976 “Prostitution” as representing both her sex-magazine works, and her views about the art world “talent being touted and sold for a price, the relationship between high art and money. How do you perceive the relationship between sex work and art?
NER: In contemporary performance nudity and nakedness is used regularly. Because of the subject matter of the work in Temptress I did want to push up against line between nudity and sexual movements, the line between pornography and contemporary dance, and introduce a proximity that might be uncomfortable as well as pleasurable.
Beaver and Temptress, Seductress, and Other Woman intentionally incorporate sexual and pornographic movements and gestures and use suggestions of nudity or partial nudity to introduce a proximity that might be uncomfortable as well as pleasurable. Exploring the content is usually seen through specific sources and pushing forward into an embodied dialogue in the artwork.
If my body as a contemporary dancer can be arousing or attractive, sexually dressed or undressed performing intentionally sexual movements or not, then it is the content of the artwork that motivates my decisions. And, if some viewers find it titillating or arousing is that a bad thing? I am working with an idea of moving away from shame and exploring that.
CXM: And how did the male gaze change since the 70s?
I don’t know that it has. I think there is more diversity of perspectives now because there are more female and other marginalized voices being supported as this project continues to add to.
CXM: Was it a challenge to publish the book during the outbreak of a pandemic. Are you planning on a traditional book launch at any time soon?
NER: In some ways the book manifesting during the pandemic was perfect. The exhibition was able to travel anywhere to anyone. It can be experienced in your own home at your own pace. And, I am looking for a location to have a BEAVER exhibition event in the future.
CXM: What’s next for Naomi Elena Ramirez?
NER: For me, the pandemic has put a damper on my own artwork aside from the book. I’m not sure what I will do next.
Naomi Elena Ramirez (b. Hermosillo, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and curator whose work encompasses visual art, video art, and contemporary dance, and the process by which the different mediums can inform each other. Naomi has an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in Dramatic Art/Dance from the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited and presented by A.I.R. Gallery, the Institute of (Im)Possible Subjects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, DoublePlus at Gibney Dance, The Bronx Latin American Art Biennial, Nurture Art Gallery, BRIC Contemporary Arts online exhibitions, Wallplay Gallery, Onomatopee Gallery, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Arts@Renaissance; The Situation Room, Los Angeles; Gallery 107, North Adams, MA; Arte Nuevo InteractivA, Mérida, Mexico; Eugene Lang College; Northwestern University’s Graduate Student Performance Studies Conference In Bodies We Trust; New Voices in Live Performance at The Center for Performance Research; amongst others. She is a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship for 2016/2017. She curates Beaver an exhibition and book project that delves into contemporary feminist perspectives on pornography, gender performance, and female sexual self-expression. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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