Lipsticks
Objects hold stories. Not just in their use, but in their wear, their shape, and the silence they witness. In the intimate space where beauty meets routine, something deeper is revealed. This project by Stacy Greene began with a glance, but quickly unfolded into a quiet investigation of identity, memory, and form.
Photography Stacy GreeneWendy
What began as a passing moment of curiosity turned into a study of transformation and meaning hidden in the everyday.
“Lipsticks” consists of a series of twenty-eight large-scale photographs. The image of each “Lipstick,” worn away through use –with some approaching the end of their lives- bears the first name of the stick’s original owner. What first attracted me to lipsticks as a possible subject for art, was suddenly noticing one day the mysterious and abstract beauty of the shape a lipstick assumed after a friend had casually applied it to her lips. Fascinated, I began to observe more closely as other women engaged in the same daily ritual and, for the first time, saw how these bright and bold objects unintentionally turn into sensual and seductive phallic mini-sculptures in shapes impossible to duplicate or imagine. When displayed on a gallery wall, these oversized images invite multiple interpretations as we imagine the hopes and dreams and fears of the women whose lips these lipsticks graced. Each photograph bears the imprint of one woman’s complex emotional past.
Simona
Roberta
Maradee
“Lipsticks” consists of a series of twenty-eight large-scale photographs. The
image of each “Lipstick,” worn away through use –with some approaching the end
of their lives– bears the first name of the stick’s original owner.”
Madelyn
Jerelyn
India
“Each photograph bears the imprint of one woman’s complex emotional past.”
Gwen
Ellen
Beth
About Stacy
She is an American artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, painting, mixed media, printmaking, video and film.
Employing a non-linear narrative, often obliquely approaching memoir, her bright, boldly-colored and witty work explores a variety of themes and subject matter – gender, exuberance, excess, materialism, advertising, cinema and more — that suggest the underlying “story” that a landscape, structure, person or object may embody. An inventive use of materials characterizes the making of her art. Her “Bindi Pop” mixed media series, “Searching for Pierre Loti” collages, and “Photo Tapestries,” for example, incorporate textiles, paint, embroidery thread, found objects, travel ephemera and her own photographs. Greene is best known for her “Lipsticks,” her series of large-scale photographs of the used lipsticks of twenty-eight different women. The works convey how a commercial product, through its use, is unconsciously transformed into an autobiographical sculpture.
Stacy Greene received a BA in Studio Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Stout. In 1979 she was awarded a grant to study at Central-St. Martin’s School of Art & Design in London. Following her time in Europe, she moved to Minneapolis to pursue her career, relocating in 1984 to Williamsburg, Brooklyn where she maintained a studio for decades. In the ‘90s, Greene’s primary medium shifted from painting and lithography to the photographic arts and she received several grants and awards for her photographic work. In the early 2000s, she shifted her focus again, this time to one-of-a-kind mixed media pieces and prints.
Her current studio practice is conducted at the Westbeth Center for the Arts in Manhattan.
To see more of her work follow her on Instagram or visit her Website
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