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[NATALIE KRICK] One of my favorite quotes by
Marilyn Monroe is something she said to the photographer
Lawrence Schiller.
She said, “Marilyn Monroe is like a veil
I wear over Norma Jeane.”
♪♪
I am a Seattle based artist and I work in
photography, collage, mixed media
and installation.
[ paper rustling ]
So my background is in photography.
I studied photography as an undergraduate student
and as a graduate student.
[ camera shutters ]
I took a photography class
when I was in high school and I got hooked.
I made a lot of photographs
of my cousin and my best friend.
They were kind of fashion shoots in our own way;
can really see us trying to perform these
different identities and trying to kind of mimic
these photographs that we saw in popular culture.
It's moments like those with the camera that
ended up being a part of my practice now.
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[ razor cutting ]
I started to move away from
just making photographs
and showing the photographic prints, and I started to think
more about how that image could be viewed as an object.
But I started cutting
things up with using fashion magazines
and putting things together in a kind of very playful way.
This act of sitting for hours
is this like really slow process that in
a way is really comforting and meditative.
[♪ upbeat music ♪]
I would that feminism plays a large role in my work
and looking at the world through a feminist lens.
I'm always really drawn to contradictions that I feel
and how I feel conflicted about the way that
some presenting people have been objectified
and photographed.
But also at the same time, there
is this love of looking that I also partake in.
So I think in my work I'm always
having a conversation
with those two things in some way or another.
[♪ upbeat music ♪]
My current exhibition at the Frye
is a collection of physical collages,
also includes text erasure, poetry
that I made into photograms, and then a digital collage
that is on the side of the building.
[ALEXIS L. SILVA] So we're currently at the Frye Art Museum
here in Seattle, Washington, and we're standing in what
we call the graphics gallery.
And so for this exhibition with Natalie Krick,
we're really focusing on exploration into a specific
compilation of photographs of Marilyn Monroe.
Yeah, so I think this one is one of my favorites,
just because I love that Natalie
really focused on Marilyn's own mark making.
[NATALIE KRICK] So everything from the show is pulled from one book,
and the book is called “The Complete Last
Sitting” by the photographer Bert Stern.
So this is the book, “The Complete Last Sitting.”
These were really the first
and only fashion photographs taken of Monroe.
And she marked a lot of them with these large x’s.
But the way that he frames this in his text,
he kind of refers to her as like, this tragedy.
“Oh, she must have been making
these x’s over her images because of self-hatred”
or something like that.
But I think about it very, very differently.
He has written this pretty lengthy text
at the beginning of the book,
which is the way that he talks
about her and objectifies her and then literally assaults
her...is quite, quite complicated.
And I know it's a different time,
but it still feels very relevant to today's world.
[♪ upbeat music ♪]
I think art is incredibly important
because we are able to have these moments
when looking at work where maybe something opens up
the way that we are thinking about the world.
[♪ upbeat music ♪]
We all bring our own experiences
and our own point of view to what we are seeing.
I think there is so much that can be uncovered by
having an art experience.
[♪ upbeat music ♪]
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-Learn more about Natalie on her website,
and make sure to checkout her art works
in the Frye Art Museum’s Boren Banner Series
running now through April 16th.
♪♪
Catch Art Zone Friday nights at 8,
and anytime online at SeattleChannel.org/ArtZone.
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