(photo by Jim Barcus)
The recent Kansas City Art Institute graduate explores female sexuality and vulnerability, as seen in her debut solo exhibition last fall
Navigating our essential selves through this world is beautiful but also laden with absolute and existential challenges. Jo Archuleta, a 2024 Kansas City Art Institute graduate in painting, investigates that complexity, the social expectations of gender identity and the feminine, broadly speaking, through her self-reflexive images of young women.
Archuleta’s lively color palette and Pop art sensibility reflect her early 2000s influences and love of the Lisa Frank-inspired school binders and popular culture she grew up with. The strength of her work attracted the attention of Miller Bogart of Gallery Bogart, where she presented her debut solo exhibition, “Middle Daughter,” in October and November.
“Jo Archuleta’s work is a powerful statement from a young artist who is not afraid to confront difficult topics in a playful and thought-provoking way,” Bogart said in the exhibition release.
The figures in her paintings and drawings unravel ideas of feminine sexuality and the often-laborious expectations surrounding it. She favors pink, red and acidic colors along with glitter and ribbons and emphasizes large eyes, pouty lips, long, painted fingernails, tiny clothes/underwear and other cliches of female sexuality. The figures often push the physical boundaries of the canvas; they seem either imprisoned or empowered by these attributes and their environments.
“The work really starts in a space of hyper criticality and self-awareness that I place upon myself,” Archuleta said. “The women are versions of me and the close relationships that I hold with the women in my life, but specifically my little sister and me. I think that I navigate the figures much like I navigate how I perceive myself. Sometimes I feel strong, independent, unreadable, alluring, attractive and yet underneath there seems to be a constant and steady stream of self-doubt, fear and cowardice.”
Her painting “Mutt” may suggest the latter feeling. The figure bends over, crammed into the composition. Her rubbery form, painted in familiar shades of pink, stretches around a clothesline, which may be a nod to the domestic, and a dog hunkers in the lower right of the painting. “The pink woman is how the world sees her, and the tiny dog is how she is treated by the world and how she sees herself,” according to Archuleta. Pummeled by social expectations and the sexualizing gaze, the tearful woman here seems burdened and exhausted.
While some of the figures in Archuleta’s work may cry or seem isolated, as in the paintings “Mutt” and “December,” sometimes they wear their vulnerability and their “femininity” as a show of solidarity. Archuleta says, “The face I put on when I go to work or have to interact with the outside world can (include) rouge; this is where masking comes into play for me. I think they are vulnerable, but I show that vulnerability in different ways.”
When paired together, the women telegraph a shared experience and mutual understanding. In “Me and Pookie,” two women huddle over a cellphone while a house burns in the background, disregarded and a dog soils the scene. In “Two Chicks & A Friggin’ Rooster,” with its seamlessly incorporated ribbons and glitter collage, the two figures are so dominant, they command and own the entire space of the canvas. Their vulnerability is tempered by their unity.
A self-portrait, or similar autobiographical utterance, asserts identity. And as Archuleta’s work affirms, we contain multitudes of identities, perhaps mirrored in the small gouache paintings of dogs whose expressions suggest hostility, mania, ennui and acquiescence, adding an exclamation mark to her work.
“I view the dog portraits as a deeper look into how the figure views herself,” Archuleta writes. “They are awkward, strange, sometimes ugly, but fully complete in their existence and also aware and playing into the objectifying and degrading joke in which they exist. They are less than — a pet, an ornament, a property, a comic relief and also a source of comfort.”
All of Archuleta’s figures — the dogs and the women who may or may not meet our gaze with confidence or vulnerability — coalesce to assert the complexities of selfhood, embrace the multiplicities of identity, with all its questions and self-doubt and, ultimately, assert a sometimes uneasy autonomy.
See more at www.instagram.com/joarchuletaart.
