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This project calls attention to artists' representations of parenting, their children, and the domestic as a critical and much needed reflection on contemporary life. Artists have long been parents but rarely have they dealt with it as the subject matter of their art--this has significantly changed in the contemporary period. I assert that the championing of the simultaneous linkage of art and parenting by contemporary artists reflects a conscientious self-fashioning of a new kind of identity, one that I am calling the 'artist-parent.' By examining the work of three artists from distinct national backgrounds--Guy Ben-Ner, Elzbieta Jablonska, and the collective Matky a Otcové--his project reveals how these artists have engaged with the domestic and personal in order to articulate larger, perhaps universal, issues of parenting in contemporary life. Arranged as three case studies, each chapter explores the particular national, cultural, and artistic influences that circumscribe understandings of the artist's practice, whether it be photography, performance, video or mixed media installation, as well as notions of gender, parenting, and the family. The second chapter examines the works of Elzbieta Jablonska, who uses her maternity as a modality in which to challenge, critique and appropriate notions of femininity, gender, and domestic roles. In particular, Jablonska's artistic practice draws on stereotypes of Polish womanhood, namely the Polish Mother. The artist ironically performs and visualizes this stereotype to engage discourse on the continued burden of mothers to become and act as superwomen and superheroes. Chapter 3 closely examines the video work of Guy Ben-Ner, who from 1999-2008 almost exclusively utilized and featured his children in his work. Ben-Ner's videos transform the domestic spaces of the home into places of artistic activity, fantasy, and child education. Through his appropriation of slapstick, early body art, and cinema, I argue that Ben-Ner is able to assert himself as an artist-parent who is concerned with the intellectual, artistic, and personal growth of his children. The fourth chapter focuses on the activities of the mixed-gender artist collective, Matky a Otcové or Mothers and Fathers. Based in Prague, CZ, the members of this group utilize their biological status as parents to investigate the private and public spaces of the family and the gendered issues it raises. I contend that the existence of a collective such as Matky a Otcové not only provides a model for artistic practice for parents, but also individuals more broadly. Their works, ranging from photography, public installation, sculpture, and performance, generate a discourse on gender roles, domesticity and artistic identity both within the borders of their home country and beyond. Through this examination of three case studies of artist-parents, we begin to see the social, political and artistic pressures that circumscribe contemporary parenting. The artists highlighted in this project, bravely enter this discourse in order to make sense of their own identities, of their own roles as cultural workers and parents, and to show that art about children, the domestic, and parenting need not be kitschy, sentimental, or saccharine.
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