Artist BioSamantha Lyn Aasen is an artist adapting to the southwest, as she holds on to her Midwestern mentalities.  As a child she had dreams of becoming a writer, as she was an avid read and creator of an active blog at the age of 12.  A car accident left her with a traumatic brain injury when she was fourteen.  This led her to take creative arts classes, which she found helped her communicate her ideas and thoughts in visual representations.   Her suburban upbringing has her questioning female relationships and societal standards.  Samantha identifies herself as a feminist artist.  She uses her art as an exploration of her ambivalence of pop culture and desire to protect young girls from facing negative attitudes about themselves or from others. Often she uses lens based media to form her artwork.  Her ongoing body, titled Sparkle Baby, is constructed with photographs and video, using herself as the subject of the imagery she creates.  Samantha also works in embroidery, beading, performance, web processes, and found objects.  The idea or intent of the work drives the outcome of material.              Samantha Lyn Aasen has had exhibitions in Indiana, Arizona, Illinois, Nebraska, Maryland, and recently the UK.  She holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Photography from Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University and a Studio Art MFA with an emphasis in Intermedia from Arizona State University.  Currently she teaches at the Maricopa Community Colleges, and volunteers with Girls Rock! Phoenix. Artist Statement Samantha Lyn Aasen’s artwork explores gender, sexuality, and pop culture by seeking out the shifting boundary between girlhood and womanhood. It is a manifestation of my own ambivalence towards the Princess-industrial-complex. Young women who seek to understand their identity through mass media representations of women find conflicting presentations. Women are still being objectified through degrading images while feeling a compulsion to be sexually available. The photographs, videos, and installations blur the line of child and adult in a perverse way. Glitter and pink products appeal to young girls and grown women as symbols of idealized girlhood. This packaging of girlhood aligns itself with absurd societal expectations of the female form in beauty treatments like Brazilian waxes, acrylic nails, infantilizing clothing and glittery cosmetics for adult women. Pink and glitter are juxtaposed with painful and sometimes grotesque attempts to meet these expectations. Aasen’s work is partially an attempt to relive the time in adolescence when she was exploring her sexuality and femininity.  By re-presenting images of herself as a character, she plays out aspects of this desire and repulsion embedded in her own girlhood and within American consumer culture. Equipment: Print is on a write hang on a frame.Sale Price: $150