This year I am an art student on an Art & Design Foundation course and as I've recently discovered feminism and felt deeply moved by it, I chose to concentrate on the issues of patriarchal structures within society in my latest project. Throughout the project I was advised to research a list of feminist artists that I could use for inspiration in my project and Barbara Kruger was an artist that stood out in particular. Kruger is an American conceptual/pop artist and much of work consists of black and white photographs overlaid with declarative captions.
Kruger's work engages the merging of found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, consumerism, and individual desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.
She juxtaposes her imagery and text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in Kruger's work. The text in her works of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."
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