Megan Koth Necessary Objects

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Megan Koth is a highly creative artist who successfully illustrates and embellishes aspects of cosmetics, beauty rituals, and personal life struggles into her artwork. At the onset of her artist talk, she explores the influences and interests that sparked her undergraduate work at ASU. Wayne Thiebaud is an influential figure who frequently paints consumer objects, which inspired her to begin her career painting cosmetic items to reveal societal and cultural criticism. Necessary Objects is a painting that portrays three objects that have become rituals in the world of feminine beauty: tweezers, lipstick, and a razor. Through the commercial imagery of these three beauty products, Koth illustrates an underlying flaw within our society, where young …show more content…

Koth continues to tug on this idea throughout her post-undergraduate artwork with the introduction of the Mask series, where she takes self portraits that feature sheet masks to explore the beautiful, yet grotesque, scene of women's beauty rituals to attain a flawless appearance. As Koth was pursuing her MFA, she took on a more cinematic experience of beauty. She beautifully captured the "mild violence" of the process of peeling off a sheet mask to parallel the pain that many women experience trying to fit into beauty standards in Pink Peel. Koth conceptualized the idea that the canvas, or the walls of the gallery, is like skin, in which she is able to manipulate and apply paint on like makeup. In Big Clown, she builds layers of paint and applies a glossy layer to resemble smudged makeup. Through these blemishes, Koth is able to create tension, anxiety, and cinematic trope to conjure a feeling of chaos to the viewer. This exceptional ability to use the sheet mask as a subject rather than the individual behind it to evoke a visceral quality of the repulsion that is associated with beauty is one of her many

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