ZOE DOUGHERTY
Zoe Dougherty is a 19 year old Metis artist from St. Catharines, Ontario who works in the mediums of ink, collage, oil paint, and acrylic paint. Dougherty grew up in St. Catharines having a fondness for drawing and a curiosity for how human attraction functions. Growing up in the early 2000s, she noticed society viewed women through a sexual male gaze, making her question what beauty truly is. With that in her thoughts, she took to visual art to express how she felt about the absurdity of the male gaze and how often it’s used against youth as well as adults. She uses common themes of feminism and identity and exaggerates the medium in order to portray a sense of urge and discomfort. Dougherty includes imagery of muscles and skin in her work to keep a connection to humanity to her work, while often not providing accurate bone structure to create flaws in her designs. Zoe Dougherty currently resides in Guelph and continues painting commissions and zines.
instagram: @zozodougherty
Abrazive!
“Abrazive!” Takes a look at the over sexualization of women and how it effects them as a whole. The front page shows a woman with an open wound with intestines and a heart pouring out of her body, this is the first demonstration of exaggeration to prove a point. The woman in view is in shock, overly expressive, and very human. She pours her body out for you to see against her will, she does not have the freedom to express herself like she wants. As the pages progress, the imagery of women soon become no longer recognizable, they become swallowed by the male gaze. One page depicts the face of a woman covered in a rash of soft, sultry, and happy mouths, with the term “Crafted for Comfort” at the bottom of the page. Designs such as this show the absurdity of the male gaze and how it restricts sexual freedom from women.
“Are You Still a Virgin?”
This zine takes a look at how over sexualization of women in media had an effect on me in my childhood. Factors such as crash diets, sexual remarks and catcalls, lack of legitimate sexual education, and a disconnect to your identity play a big part on the development of a young girl’s brain. They have no freedom to express themselves, every choice of hair style, hobby, clothing or lack thereof is sexualized only to contribute to the fact that there has to be some form of control over women. Industries use female sexuality empowerment against them to make them feel ashamed of themselves. In any case, this zine takes examples of how I felt about my body as well as everything that made me a woman, to the misguided education on how to express myself sexually and love my body and how that mentally harmed me, to how men took advantage of the societal norms to control me.
Money Machine
This project is quite small with only two pages, but focuses on the subject of women living in Canadian Capitalist societies. There’s focus on the shame that sex workers face with stigmatism from the general public, and that presents sex work in an unnecessarily taboo light. Pornography has been seen as a harmful means of corrupting society’s norms, but there’s no discussion of ethical and safe porn, there’s constant shaming of sexual expression and working in the field of sex work that should be stopped as it harms working women. If you want women to feel safe then there should be safe and healthy ways of pursuing sex work. Earning money as a woman is extremely difficult when you endure shame from society while also being a prominent factor in industries such as the pornography industry. Retail is also included in this piece as I touch on what it’s like to work in retail and how it effects young women. There is an immense amount of harassment and threats from customers and uncomfortable employees, factors like that cause severe stress on young women working in a capitalist society. Women are made to feel lesser than their counterparts in the work place, whether that be with the wage gap, fields of work, or their mental and physical well-being.
