Genevieve Gaignard

Genevieve Gaignard (1981), born Orange, Massachusetts, is best known for work exploring issues of cultural identity as a self-identified mixed-race woman. Gaignard’s work utilizes photography, videography, and installation to explore the overlap of black and white America through staged environments and character performances. She received her BA in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2007, and an MFA at Yale University in 2014. Gaigrard's represented by Shulamit Nazarian gallery in Los Angeles, and her work was exhibited at The Cabin LA in Los Angeles, CA, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA The Foley Gallery, New York, NY, and two residentially-owned gallery exhibitions in Los Angeles, CA. Her work's featured in publications as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Gaignard’s photographic series is inspired by Carrie Mae Weems with similarities to Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman formatted as the 21st-century selfie.

Early life

Born and raised in a Massachusetts mill town to a white mother and black father, Gaignard grew up between black and white cultures. Before enrolling at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Gaignard first enrolled at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island in their baking and pastry program. She became interested in pursuing the arts after one of her professors became her mentor. Her professor created alternative assignments to baking challenging Gaignard differently, he reintroduced old mediums such as collage and opened Gaignard to experimentation with installation pieces. According to Gaignard, she “went through this phase where Abercrombie & Fitch was really cool, I would rip pages out of the catalog and collage my whole wall with half naked guys.” Gaignard began investigating racial dynamics with the use of composed environments and fabricated characters.

Gaignard began photographing her family and neighbors as she transitioned into the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Given the assignment “dealing with flesh,” Gaignard used her mother as a subject for her photographs.

Following her graduation in 2007, She applied to Yale University where she was wait-listed. Her anxiety surrounding her admission status motivated her to experiment with video art, where she created offbeat films. After she was accepted, Gaignard transitioned back to photographic mediums with the added juxtaposition of installation elements. Yale's prominent white student body contrasted the culturally enriched city of New Haven challenging Gaignard to re-establish a balance between her two ethnicities. During her time at Yale, she began incorporating the intensity of race and storytelling in her work, “My expression as a person of color is different than others. I have something to say...The stuff I say now sort of addresses a lot of feelings I had as a child.” It was through her exploration of race and family relations that she began creating personas with elaborate domestic interior pieces.

Work

As an emerging artist, Gaignard first garnered attention and notoriety with her 2016 exhibition Smell the Roses. Smell the Roses was first featured at The California African American museum where her photograph "Extra Value (After Venus)" gained traction for her series. Gaignard's character pressed against a painted American flag on the side of a jail wall holding a McDonalds cup and value fries was later featured in the Los Angeles Times November 17th, 2016.

Gaignard explores the topic of racial “passing” and gender to address the difficulties of being a mixed race woman in American society. While Gaignard’s work is said to be similar to Cindy Sherman and Carrie Mae Weems, she prefers not to be compared to them. Like Weems, Gaignard’s works focuses on black female bodies and their place within society. Gaignard’s digital photographs utilize pop culture references and selfie culture to examine being mixed race and black womanhood. She consistently challenges herself by questioning mass media and how it presents white and black culture by pushing the personifications and contrast in her fictitious, femme characters.

Gaignard blends her digital photography with installations involving characteristics of the ideal family home. She states “When I make an installation, I want it to be somewhere between a Wes Anderson film and Harmony Korine’s Gummo: gross and perfect at the same time but those are also super white references—so, that’s always my challenge.” Her 2016 exhibition, "Smell the Roses" at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, California, is a statement on her mixed heritage and life growing up. By combining stereotypically white and stereotypically black livelihoods together in her installations, she challenges the viewer to immerse themselves in experience and to observe different lifestyles and states of being.

Gaignard exaggerates elements within her personifications poising racial anxieties for viewers through parallel perspectives of her own self-identity. Although racial contrast is important to her characters and her overall work, Gaignard also blurs the lines between representations of black and white women by drawing on current and past pop culture references. By blending representations, stereotypes, and taking inspiration from drag culture, she further challenges beauty standard norms, while also showing others the “invisibility” she faced growing up.