Removed - Naomi Uman

Removed (1999) by Naomi Uman was an inspiration for many of my works for different reasons. Every time I watch it, I find something knew and exciting about it and a new idea comes to my mind.

First time I watched the soft porn movie from the seventies that Uman appropriated, and then, by using nail polish remover and bleach, erased the women from the 16mm film, leaving only a white silhouette in their place, I thought that her idea of removing a woman’s objectified image from a porn movie to be a very interesting way to break with classic Hollywood narrative that transforms women in objects of vision. In a way, she follows what Laura Mulvey suggested in her quintessential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, when she called for avant-garde experimental filmmakers to break the rules of traditional Hollywood films.

But one thing that I noticed about “Removed” at the time was that even though the women were erased and the men were now the ones to be looked at, the woman kept her role as object, as the white erasure marks are what really call our attention when we watch the movie. That was part of my inspiration for a series of photographs that I called “The Break Up”. I made portraits of couples and then physically cut the men out of the photographs, creating a black silhouette to replace them. That way I used their absence to call attention to their image, doing the opposite of what Naomi Uman did.

A couple of months ago I watched the film again during a “Film Friday at the Varsity” session. This time I started noticing how the erasure process was also a way to conceal the images of those women. I’ve been working with the subject of Battered Women and volunteering at the women’s center, and that made me think about how many women are hiding at the center. My latest work is the story of a battered woman and I will use a technique similar to Naomi’s Removed to “hide” the woman’s identity by substituting her image by a texture that represents her feelings.

Naomi Uman is an artist that inspires my work and I will never get tired to watch “Removed”, as it is an intriguing, aesthetically interesting work of art.

Here is a youtube link with the movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEkMKdf_9Fs