Bio
Siena is a self taught internationally collected artist.
Examples of her elegant and obscene work can be found in the Tom of Finland Foundation collection, hanging next to Kim Gordon in Nashville and emblazoned across the chests of Harajuku fashionistas.
She continues to collaborate with iconic Japanese fashion legends Hysteric Glamour, hits the studio every day and sells on the secondary market.
About the artwork
A rapture of feminine pop power refracted through the gaze of a generation coming of age on the internet.
Despite our ever-quickening online environment, our old, pagan desire for goddess worship can be seen everywhere from strip clubs to the sirens of the silver screen.
Siena Barnes’ ink drawings celebrate queer icons who, like goddesses, challenge the status quo and take up more space than society would care to permit.
The work riffs on camp, defined in “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural”, where authenticity is revealed through artifice.
As notions of the feminine evolve, the Venusian ideal expands, fucking with societal gender norms to include the stars of Ru Paul’s drag Race, non binary beauties and proto pop idol Liz Taylor.
In the vein of Velazquez’s “The Toilet of Venus,” notions of the gaze are complicated by the internet with content creators behind and in front of the lens. Who is looking at who?
The artist reclaims her body through drawing subjects who return the gaze, in a contest of power. They challenge relational femininity — or the idea that the feminine is only alive in the eyes of the male gaze — and present an emboldened blend of grrl power.
Bio
Siena is a self taught internationally collected artist.
Examples of her elegant and obscene work can be found in the Tom of Finland Foundation collection, hanging next to Kim Gordon in Nashville and emblazoned across the chests of Harajuku fashionistas.
She continues to collaborate with iconic Japanese fashion legends Hysteric Glamour, hits the studio every day and sells on the secondary market.
About the artwork
A rapture of feminine pop power refracted through the gaze of a generation coming of age on the internet.
Despite our ever-quickening online environment, our old, pagan desire for goddess worship can be seen everywhere from strip clubs to the sirens of the silver screen.
Siena Barnes’ ink drawings celebrate queer icons who, like goddesses, challenge the status quo and take up more space than society would care to permit.
The work riffs on camp, defined in “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural”, where authenticity is revealed through artifice.
As notions of the feminine evolve, the Venusian ideal expands, fucking with societal gender norms to include the stars of Ru Paul’s drag Race, non binary beauties and proto pop idol Liz Taylor.
In the vein of Velazquez’s “The Toilet of Venus,” notions of the gaze are complicated by the internet with content creators behind and in front of the lens. Who is looking at who?
The artist reclaims her body through drawing subjects who return the gaze, in a contest of power. They challenge relational femininity — or the idea that the feminine is only alive in the eyes of the male gaze — and present an emboldened blend of grrl power.