Zoe Brester-Pennings

My work is an exploration of beauty, femininity, and fallibility through an interdisciplinary practice spanning from print, sculpture, and video. Based in performance, I explore hyper-femme personas and create portaits depicting melancholic figures, all of which are based on photos of myself. Part self-portrait, part cathartic desire to indulge in the “feminine”, these hyperbolic depictions of womanhood are garish and comedic. The desire to simultaneously be seen and unseen is present in the work, as I explore my own gender expression while also failing to live up to the expectations that are ingrained in our society. 

 In my recent work,  I have created the hyper-femme character known as Buck Wilde, a former rodeo clown and certified bimbo. Through the performed persona I have created a mythos around an endearing caricature of womanhood as she stumbles blithely through a world that doesn’t take her seriously. The work involves auto-fiction, as I perform this character, what happens to her is simultaneously happening to me, and the line between narratives are blurred. These performed encounters become mythic in nature, as people interact with the bombastic Buck Wilde they collaborate with me to create folklore based upon the experiences. These experiences inspire the prints, which become mediated works of Buck’s existence and a catalogue of the melancholic femme experience