Gender & Viewer/Work/Artist

I am making images that explore and deconstruct locations of urban myth and legend while attempting to compile a database of cultural experience.

In relation to Mr. Hickey's essay on the gender of art pieces, I would consider this selected work as a feminine image. In fact, I would describe most of the images I've made in this Concepts class as feminine. I think this one, along with my most recent images, would be considered as a vaginal image. However, I would not say that my works fit into what Freid calls the "supreme fiction" - that is, they do not impose that the viewer is not present. Rather, I'd like to think that they place the viewer in the photo itself, as someone who is experiencing the image. I also thought that the discussion of the dissolution of the artist-work-viewer menagé à trois idea relates to my image(s), in the way that I disagree. Hickey states, "....the function of the beholder is to be dominated and awestruck by the work of art, which undergoes a sex-change and is recast as a simulacrum of the male artist's autonomous, impenetrable self." I believe that my work does not function in that manner because it is not impenetrable. It invites the viewer in to travel up the water and disappear through the tunnel.