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Bio

Emma McKay Ryan is an artist currently living and working in South Bend, Indiana, where she is teaching and pursuing her MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Notre Dame. She grew up on a farm outside of Minden, Nebraska and earned her BA in studio arts with a professional emphasis in drawing from Doane University in Crete, Nebraska. She has gained valuable experience through two internships at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, and another at the LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries, including Manifest Gallery, Indianapolis Art Center, South Bend Museum of Art, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Through her artwork, she exposes the absurdity of the beauty industry propelled by social media through contemporary drawings that juxtapose abstraction with figuration.

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Artist Statement

From “get ready with me” videos to reels of “the 7 essentials you need in your purse right now,” and “the latest fashion trends,” young women and teenage girls’ TikTok and Instagram feeds are filled with all the ways they need to better themselves. At first glance, these posts oftentimes seem harmless; however, seeing video after video of how you need to better your life in unachievable ways leaves the self feeling inadequate.

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The beauty industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is expected to reach close to $736 billion in global revenue by 2028. Making up over 20 percent of the entire e-commerce market, the beauty industry has been propelled by the expansion of social media since the COVID-19 Pandemic. Feminist artists like Martha Rosler began critiquing the problems associated with the beauty industry back in the 70s, but the problem of marketing to women has only grown since. Sophisticated algorithms, propelled by watching their users’ every move, project enviable lifestyles through influencers' perfectly lit, clean, and hypnotic videos and posts. Today, the targeted social media ads, influencers promoting products, and videos telling women how to create “the perfect life” cause young women, and even younger girls, to self-objectify.

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Through mixed media drawings, I expose the absurdity of the beauty industry propelled by social media by exaggerating the images we are exposed to every day. I ironically juxtapose digital elements of social media against drawn marks that perform as beauty products. Oftentimes only fragments of the image are rendered to completion, coinciding with the ways in which women are picked apart and objectified in the media. By mixing figuration and abstraction and calling on feminist theorists, I highlight the internal conflict that arises from the critical self-evaluation I, and many other young women, have grown accustomed to with the use of the internet and social media.

© 2023 Emma McKay Ryan

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