Tremble Like a Flower | Annie Duncan

“…San Francisco-based ceramicist and painter Annie Duncan has explored the expanded symbolism of consumer objects and how they frame femininity as slippery or malleable yet something that has historically formed (or at least informed) a person’s relationship with the world. Duncan uses the still life genre to evoke women’s agency in producing their self-image. Considered a “lower” form of art than portraiture or history painting, still life painting was historically one of the only painting genres in which women could seriously participate. By macerating a historical painting genre with the aesthetics of consumer-identity capitalism, Duncan insists that the history of women’s relationship to things must be studied, as modern capitalism attempts to sell us back our identities in pretty prim packages…Women fabricate still lives and sitter identities every day: on the internet, in our rooms. The imagined or fictionalized aspect of this ritual—creating a version of the self we want to project to the outside using objects alone—is, ironically, a type of agency. And desire?” - Katherine Jemima Hamilton