Samantha Siegler
Cornell University, History of Art, Undergraduate
Performance artist ORLAN used plastic surgery in La Réincarnation de Sainte-Orlan (1990-1993), altering her body based off features of famous figures in Western paintings to criticize historical, male-induced notions of beauty. In this... more
Performance artist ORLAN used plastic surgery in La Réincarnation de Sainte-Orlan (1990-1993), altering her body based off features of famous figures in Western paintings to criticize historical, male-induced notions of beauty. In this performance, ORLAN hybridized two seemingly polar entities, the soul and technology, to connect them to identity in the postmodern era. La Réincarnation de Sainte-Orlan announced that seemingly futuristic, cyborg technology is in fact a reality of the present, and that the body is now obsolete. Her work is iconoclastic of the 'pure' human body, which is an artifact of constructed conceptions of physical beauty, in favor of something that is not completely foreign, but rather more fluid and unfixed. Her bodily transformation embraced postmodern abilities for corporeal malleability and deconstructed historical conceptions of beauty, all the while questioning the role of physical appearance in identity. Performance artist ORLAN uses medical technology and plastic surgery as part of her work, often transforming her physical appearance to make statements about broader concepts. ORLAN states that she considers
Research Interests:
The discourses around intermedia artist Ana Mendieta have been rewritten and restructured as past interpretations of her work have been critiqued and discredited. Scholarship from the 1990s has been criticized for categorizing Mendieta as... more
The discourses around intermedia artist Ana Mendieta have been rewritten and restructured as past interpretations of her work have been critiqued and discredited. Scholarship from the 1990s has been criticized for categorizing Mendieta as a feminist artist, and while these texts may have reduced the complexity of Mendieta's work and grouped her too easily with artists who had different aims, the analysis of how her work is and is not feminist should not be abandoned. In this essay I investigate the extent to which Mendieta aligned herself and her work with feminism, as well as how she has been posthumously canonized to serve the agendas of feminist artists and protest groups.
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The Watermark Identification in Rembrandt's Etchings project (WIRE), a multidisciplinary collaboration among museums, university faculty, and students, aims to promote digital access to Rembrandt paper scholarship. Its chief innovation is... more
The Watermark Identification in Rembrandt's Etchings project (WIRE), a multidisciplinary collaboration among museums, university faculty, and students, aims to promote digital access to Rembrandt paper scholarship. Its chief innovation is the use of the decision tree model for the visual differentiation of watermarks, incorporated into an interactive and expandable online identification aid illustrated with images of all known examples. New image data provided by the Watermark Imaging Box Project (WImBo) will significantly enhance the decision tree through images of greater clarity and completeness. WIRE has also begun to discover new watermarks on Rembrandt's papers; increased availability of full-sheet images of prints and drawings from Rembrandt and his circle from as yet untapped collections will drive construction of a watermarks database, and also assist efforts to date papers without watermarks.