Camille Ross

Lives and works in Morganville, New Jersey

Artist statement

Artist Statement: The Women, an Essay by Camille Ross My new work, a series called “The Women”, exhibits systemically oppressed women in new representations. The work exhibits culturally perceived oppressed women into positions of power, of opulence, of freedom and joy. I’ve chosen the most oppressed women in American culture, Native American women and African American women. Unfortunately, due to a long legacy of historically and systemically oppressed groups of women of color, we as a culture are sadly accustomed to viewing these women through a lens of poverty and lack. They are contextualized as such in their historic imagery, where their visual representations situate them in a context of poverty and as women without agency, where they are all too often represented as disadvantaged women and perceived as women who have no valid needs. Even sadder, lies an erroneous subtext suggesting that women of color are so dismissed in White America, and perceived as “women who do nothing and want nothing”, perpetrated again by White male fantasies and projections in polemical oppression and in Trump’s version of women in America. Resulting in negating women of color’s genuine human needs and desires. Society has ignored their needs since slavery. It’s also important to mention that many of the stereotypes I’m referring to in this essay are old, musty and outdated stereotypes especially since the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980’s to today where diversity is America’s most...

Artwork