Julia Aknin

My sweet Penelope 💜

Pictures of my 3rd year diploma at Beaux arts Paris 🌸🍭

It questions aspects of seduction such as makeup and how we pose in front of a camera. Seeing These tutorials, I built my some of my notions of feminity and habits around it. What can it mean for other girls who engaged with it, did it play a role in the woman that they are today as well as it did for me ?

Inspired by retrica’s heart photo montage, popular in the years 2010’s

I gave the plaster a draped print, engaging the painting in a memory-like atmosphere, with floating shadows of figures and a frozen kiss.

These paintings of dresses on paper allows the subjects to be vulnerable and fragile, the paper cracks in some spots and it is also folded in 6, giving a « passing note » feeling.

The varnish gives it a commercial finish, blurring the lines between art and advertisement.

32 cm x 22cm

This next article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Pace chapter. The majority of my conversation with Munson centered around her exhibition, “The Pink Bedroom,” and she gave me such an interesting inside perspective on the piece. “Our stuff defines who we are” and creates the world around us. So when confronted with just how fetishized the commercialization of women’s items and media are, it should be a space that provokes emotion, good or bad. This is exactly the type of reaction from an audience that Munson desires as an artist. With how regularly we see our culture as consumers changing, the products that we interact with change with us and reflect who we are. My final question for Portia Munson might be considered a cliché one, but important nonetheless: what advice would you give to college-aged women like the ones in Her Campus? Her answer was a perfect one. Firstly, following your passions and interests no matter what they are is the best thing you could possibly do, as “the most important audience is yourself.” And lastly, the world as we know it is “made up,” so we never have to accept what is given to us as our fate. We are free to create the world for ourselves that we want to see, just like we do in our art and expression. To support Portia Munson and follow her work, she is most active on Instagram, @portiamunson, and is represented by PPOW Gallery here in New York City.          

33 cm x 25 cm

series of acrylic paintings inspired by family pictures of girls ready for prom, in dusty, dark, dirty living rooms... Questions the contrast between their dream and their reality.