Bedecked with a full-head of forest green hair and complimented by bright-eyed green lashes, pencil-thin eye liner, and green eye shadow, Joy Maringa presents the embodiment of cutting-edge contemporary culture, beauty, and art.
It would seem
she doesn’t see herself as a spectacle, especially as other young women in
Nairobi are changing their hair color every month.
“During my
days working exclusively as a make-up artist, I came to appreciate it as a form
of visual art,” she told BD Life.” Indeed, just like a professional painter,
she worked with palettes filled with color. She worked and still works with an
array of brushes, only on a smaller scale.
Her
transition from makeup artist to full-time professional painter who is also
working as a sculptor in her current showcase at Kobo Gallery came gradually.
But from the look of her first solo exhibition which she entitled “Pertinent
Perspective’, she is definitely entitled to claim the title of full-time professional
visual artist.
“Actually, I
consider myself both a makeup and a visual artist since I’m still being called
to do people’s makeup and I love doing it for them. It’s fun,” she adds.
So is ‘Pertinent
perspectives’ which could be seen as a jab at another perspective called
‘the male gaze.”
As you walk
into Kobo’s vast gallery space, the show gives no hint of being even slightly
subversive. One sees a long row of large square-shaped paintings, each covered
in a single color, be it green, yellow, brown or black. Then on top of the
color are affixed rows and rows of brown-colored mini-sculptures.
Then, she’s
got several stands with assorted boxes on top of them. We gravitate towards one
stand that has an open box looking like the kind filled with over-priced
European
dark chocolates. It is clearly meant to look that way. But the ‘chocolates’ are tiny, duplicated sculptures shaped like what? I ask the artist.
“They are
shaped like large nipples, the ones at the tip of women’s breasts,” Joy explains.
Before she
can reveal where her fascination with women’s nipples comes from, we head over
to one of her large square paintings. We want to know why the uniformity of
shape in them. “I like order in my things, and always have,” she says.
But here
again, as in the “chocolate box”, she has uniformly aligned mini-sculptures which
she had cast not in brass as she had hoped to do, but in a mix of dental stone powder.
“I created
two molds since women’s breasts are never exactly alike. Neither are their
nipples,” she says, speaking as if she’s an expert in the study of women’s nipples.
It turns out, she is.
“Supposedly,
women’s nipples (not their breasts) are not to be shown in public. And if they
are , women are meant to feel shame,” she adds. She notes that in traditional
African society, there was no shame in showing women’s breasts. But now, it's
taboo. The nipple has become a sexual turn-on for Westernized men, she says.
It’s a function of modernity, male dominance in Western culture, and the ‘male
gaze’ which Joy is challenging. It’s as if she is putting all those nipples out
there on canvas, in chocolate boxes, and even in her colorful make-up palette
to make a proud statement about the beauty of ladies’ nipples.
Shameless
about her own big nipples now, Joy admits she grew up feeling ashamed of hers. Men
used to abuse her publicly, or laugh sarcastically, as if she was a deformed
misfit.
Now is her
time to fight back in the only way she knows how, with her art.
The show
itself doesn’t feel vengeful or erotic even though she says men apparently have
been programmed in these times to get excited when they see women or girls with
shapely boobs. Yet even I can recall when African men were respectful of
women’s breasts. They said breasts were for babies to suckle, not for men to
paw.
Treading on
uncharted territory, one can’t remember a time in art history when women’s
nipples were details highlighted by the art historians. Women’s breasts were featured in many
classical paintings, although not without controversy.
As
increasing number of Kenyan women come out and make radical statements with
their art, the male gaze will gradually lose its power to dominate how women
see themselves. It’s already begun as more women artists, like Joy, have a
‘pertinent perspective’ that is not at war with men. It’s simply illustrating
their own artistic empowerment, and it’s about time.
