Lillian Cheever

Lillian Cheever is pursuing a BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History at Purchase College. They will be presenting their senior project “Self-Objectification as a means of exploring the Gendered Subject in Amber Hawk Swanson’s Amber Doll Project.” Their project explores how Swanson’s Performance art deploys hyper femininity and self-objectification to point to the fictive nature of an internally constituted gender identity and to highlight how the ways we perform and embody gender are relative and relational. Lillian’s project contextualizes Swanson’s performance art in an historical lineage of feminist art, which uses performances of over-identification, parody, and mimesis as a stage where artists are able to toy with fraught images of femininity and question their audiences’ assumptions surrounding the real, the feminine, and the self.