KittenDiotima

Unless otherwise noted, every one of my deviations is made from photos i took myself. All of my work is copyright 2014-2017 by Kitten Diotima. All my rights are reserved.

I'd been a theatre artist before I was disabled with a traumatic brain injury and chronic headache almost ten years ago. For 15 years I worked in physical theatre, writing my own shows, and creating work in an ensemble. My parents loved visual art, so they took me to a lot of galleries and museums growing up. I took Drawing and Art History classes in school, and I've always collected art books, prints and comics. Since becoming disabled i've been doing a lot of writing, and photography. I like manipulating photographs, becoz I enjoy changing, altering and/or destroying what we view as "normal," skewing our perceptions of reality. I'm very inspired by Dada artists; I especially love Hannah Hoch's collages, which literally take apart social constructs and re-build them into something unexpected, while questioning basic gender and social dynamics. I'm also inspired by Expressionism, which is an odd combo, since Dada rebelled against Expressionism, but i love emotional sharing, i love how Kathe Kollwitz melded her emotional landscape with the outer world in a way that questioned society.

I discovered Surrealism as a teen, and long ago fell in love with the work of Lee Miller and Man Ray. Lately I've been influenced by Remedios Varo, a Mystical Surrealist painter, who used art to explore not only the subconscious, but ways in which the subconscious can be used to influence the world around us; Sarah Moon, whose dreamy photographs make us look at our world in different ways; and Claude Cahun, a lesbian Surrealist writer and photographer whose self-portraits explored gender roles and gender expression as masks that can be taken on and off. And I find strange comfort and inspiration in the work of Frida Kahloe, whose chronic pain led to a deep, at times disturbing exploration of Self. As a queer, transsexual woman, i've come to see how "reality" is a social construct. We create our Selves, and are created BY our environment, piecemeal. We are born into a social, gender, religious, heteronormative world order that assumes so much, and most of us never question it - and even many who do question still look at things thru the same heteronormative viewfinder they were born into. It's difficult to grasp just how constructed our identities and culture are. As a teen, I thought I questioned everything - and for SO long i thought I understood who I was, and how society worked, only to realize in my middle age that i'd barely understood anything.
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