Unseating the Male Gaze

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Jay Senetchko, “Death of the Standing Nude,” 2018

oil on canvas, 72" x 48"

Jay Senetchko tackles a lot with his trio of paintings in a three-person exhibition, Unseated, at Vancouver’s Parker Projects until Dec. 1. As a white male painter, he considers the problem of how to represent the female figure, embracing both Soviet-era social realism and the more general history of the female nude in European art. He speaks about the male gaze and objectification because it would be impossible not to.

By representing three women wearing everyday clothes but positioned in classical poses – standing, seated and reclining – he attempts to bypass the male gaze while alluding to a key tenet of Soviet social realism, that the subjects had to be relevant and relatable to the proletariat.

The woman in Death of the Standing Nude wears jeans and a T-shirt, while the woman lying prone on the ground is dressed in a tank top and shorts. The upright woman is self-possessed. Her hands rest on her head in a pose reminiscent of the 1820 painting La Source, by French neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, which shows a woman languidly emptying a vessel of water. Senetchko’s woman, standing at the edge of a wheat field, could easily have just finished a farm chore.

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Jay Senetchko, “Death of the Seating Nude,” 2018

oil on canvas, 60" x 48"

Death of the Seated Nude refers to Ilya Repin’s painting Ukrainian Girl, completed in the 1870s, well before the Russian Revolution. Repin came from a family of Russian military settlers in Ukraine, which makes that painting particularly significant to Senetchko, an Edmonton-born self-taught artist with Ukrainian roots.

All three figures are clad in identical shades of yellow and blue, the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Senetchko added a red scarf to the seated figure and posed a red flip-flop beside one foot of the reclining nude as a reference to victims of violent conflicts.

Blue, yellow and red also refer to Kazimir Malevich’s preference for primary colours in his social realist paintings. Malevich is remembered for developing Suprematism, a movement of geometric abstraction, but in the 1930s, under Russia’s Stalinist regime, he was pressured to adopt social realism, essentially a form of propaganda that portrayed the working life of the peasantry as happy.

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Jay Senetchko, “Death of the Reclining Nude,” 2018

oil on canvas, 54" x 58"

The other two artists in the show, David Ellingsen and David Robinson, also work with the figure, but here focus on males in photographs and sculpture, respectively. The show’s title, Unseated, is a homonym to unceded, a word now commonly used to refer to the Indigenous territory on which Vancouver is located. It seems a strange choice with its implied power shift.

It’s not easy for a male artist to come up with a way to paint the female form given the medium’s patriarchal history. While the scale and style of Senetchko’s paintings are heroic, the assertive presence of the seated and standing figures invert the male gaze. These are strong women represented as strong women. There is never a surplus of this type of imagery. ■

Unseated is on view at Parker Projects in Vancouver from Oct. 25 to Dec. 1, 2018. Jay Senetchko is also exhibiting his work in a solo show titled A Painter's Process at Vancouver's Pendulum Gallery from Nov. 13 to Dec. 15, 2018.