Vagina Painting (After Kubota) is an homage to artist and Fluxus member Shigeko Kubota, who first performed a tongue-in-cheek piece called “Vagina Painting” in 1964 at a FLUXUS performance art event in New York City. At the time Shigeko Kubota was responding to the famous quote by Pierre-Auguste Renoir where he stated that he “paints with his prick”.
In Vagina Painting (After Kubota), Barry uses her body to create a gestural abstract painting with red wine & gouache on canvas. Barry projects the painting process onto the wall behind her. Throughout this process Barry considers the colonial legacy of violence against women, specifically in the visual arts. Barry is influenced by their phenomenological, or lived experience as a queer, sexualized, gendered and disabled bodied person (Barry lives with stage-4 Endometriosis characterized by issues of chronic pain). Barry thinks of her body as both an object and a subject and they use this tension in the work.
Vagina Painting was first performed for “Not Sent Letters”, Jeremy Todd’s performance meet-up, at VIVO Media Art Centre, Vancouver, 2017, and then at “Body Response” an Indigenous lead festival at Open Space, Victoria, Canada, 2018, and at the Zero Gravity International Performance Art Festival, 2019.
Reviews:
“Brilliant and quietly challenging”
-Wanda VanderStoop, Director of Distribution, Vtape, Toronto
“ [Vagina Painting] was incredible to watch as there are so many levels to the piece, it left me thinking about a number of things – the act of painting and gender, excess, the gaze, the current political climate, the representation of women in art history, and those things about the body that are non-negotiable. -Margaret Dragu, artist