ANDREA MARY MARSHALL

Andrea Mary Marshall is a self-portrait artist living and working in New York City. Originally, she studied fashion design at Parsons School of Fashion. Soon after graduating, she shifted to fine art, staging self-portraits in photography, video, performance, and painting. Her fine art training is mostly self-taught, although she has certainly taken cues from artists like Cindy Sherman.

Her work deals with female identity and sexuality especially as it relates to advertising and the fashion world. She often references significant portraits of women in art history. One of her characters, Gia Condo, is loosely based on the mystery surrounding the Mona Lisa.

Her work also contains a lot of religious themes and iconography.

I like how she exaggerates the melodramatic nature of fashion advertising and depictions of women to humorous, although still elegant, proportions. She brings to light some very interesting parallels between fashion and religion and their depictions of women. One of these parallels is the tragic seriousness that infects them both. Her self-portraits reflect the stoic, restrained facial expressions and poses of religious and fashion imagery. I have always found this seriousness strange since it is often present with characters who are in dramatic, unusual situations. The other parallel is the simultaneous worship and degradation of women. (See Self Portrait as Trash Bag Mona Lisa) This comments on the contradictory madonna/whore dichotomy that is imposed on women. Whether she is aware of these congruencies or not, I think they are what make her work most compelling.