TENNIS SKIRT

Hannah Berger is a student in the Art History and Studio Arts program at Concordia University. Her sculpture Tennis Work is a conceptual work that depicts a seemingly mundane item of clothing, but works to unearth the charged symbolic possibilities that can exist in such objects. Berger shares, “I was interested in the tennis skirt as something that is both a symbol of youthful femininity, and, removed from its original context, has been transformed into a sexualized fetishistic object. It’s something that has a heavy double meaning.” In creating this project, Berger echoed the symbolic weight of this object in the material used to create it. Tennis Skirt is casted in bronze, born from an arduous process that has been used to create the most highly-valued art in history, especially in classical sculpture. Bronze is the material of monuments; it has long been used to honour individuals and events that have been collectively deemed culturally significant. Keeping this historic material practice in mind, Berger set out to create a work that memorialized the experiences that young, contemporary women often face as they navigate the internet and a world that relies on the widespread, commercialized oversexualization of female bodies.

Of her own experience, Berger says, “I grew up on the Internet on various image-based sharing platforms where you’re just bombarded with images of sexualized women. [At those impressionable phases in my life], my brain was absorbing those very powerful, gestural, and sexual images. And your sexuality and sense of self are contrived from exposure to those kinds of images.” Self-objectification or habitual body monitoring, a theme explored in Berger’s work, is one of the main effects of being continually and relentlessly exposed to a visual language that privileges patriarchal conceptions of ideal embodiment of womanhood.

Berger accentuates her interest in the visual language of antiquity by likening Tennis Skirt to a Roman kilt. The sculpture is disintegrating, but it remains intact. The choice to display this sculpture on the floor is not an insignificant one; Berger is speak- ing to our societal desire to valorize the individuals depicted in monuments, while at the same time, femme bodies are often treated as conduits through which certain subsects of society can assert dominance and power over the very bodies they are wielding.

Tennis Skirt also points to the dichotomy of material value we place on ostensibly permanent objects such as bronze monuments, and contrasts it with the disposable and infinitely replaceable status that underscores the manufacturing of fast fashion. Berger calls attention to the fact that these societally agreed-upon value scales are not neutral, but a result of societies that are shaped around patriarchal standards. With this sculpture, Berger invites us to contemplate these layered and nuanced considerations of how our social worlds are formed.