STATEMENT OF WORK

B.Quinn is a conceptual and visual artist. Unapologetically feminist, her work typically features traces of gesture and obsessive repetition. Although they may at first glance look unrelated—walls smeared with margarine to 18,928 handmade clay cookies to experimental video—each project is a continuation of the last and informs future experimentation.

In the Banal Déjà Vu series of drawings, the gesture of drawing the numerals of the date is repeated throughout a meditative, intuitive, automatic drawing process. Akin to On Kawara or Roman Opalka, she chronicles time with immediate, cumulative mark-making, like that found in the works of German outsider artists such as Barbara Suckfüll and Emma Hauck. This reflection on time, temporality, and its relationship to her own body and mortality are also present in recent video works Candle and Heartbeat. and Five-twenty four a.m.

Then in the eighteen-hour video work, The Haircut, the gesture of the video "cut" along with the visual representation of women cutting or having their haircut repeats, scene after scene in this obsessive investigation of the haircut as a cinematic story-telling trope that gives or takes away power from the women it transforms on screen. 

To produce this video-based work, Quinn spent two years researching and gathering source material from hundreds of clips of women receiving haircuts or cutting their own hair, sampled from close to 600 films. Across The Haircut's 18-hour duration, these fragmented representations of women are organized according to their diegetic time. The resulting work connects disparate characters across time periods, countries, cultures, language, and most importantly, each woman's individual circumstances.

The Haircut includes numerous examples of self-haircuts and makeovers. In these scenes, the typical stereotypes associated with the haircut as a gestural narrative device communicate to the viewer that a woman is acting out during a moment of mental duress, hiding their identity, or conforming to or rebelling against societal standards. However, alongside scenes such as these—think Audrey Hepburn getting a bob haircut in Roman Holiday—there are frequent instances in which the haircut takes place as part of violence against women. These examples range from concentration camp head-shavings and schoolgirls ganging up on a classmate to unsettling depictions that take place as part of kidnapping, public humiliation, or sexual assault.

In The Haircut, Quinn centers the gesture of the haircut to consider its repetition within the traumatic realism of popular culture. The gesture's function and recurrence show the haircut, when enacted on a woman's body and psyche, can range from a form of healing to an act and location of trauma.