Koth

Featured Artist: Megan Koth

Artist Biography

Megan Koth, born in 1992, grew up in Cave Creek, Arizona. She attended Arizona State University on a President's Scholarship, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014. In 2018, she moved to California to pursue a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. During this time, she has been awarded the Howard Fenton Award for Excellence in Painting by the UCSB School of Art, as well as the Ludington-Parshall Scholarship Award by the Santa Barbara Art Association. Her work has appeared in Voyage-Phoenix, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, and Phoenix New Times. Her work resides in private collections throughout the United States.

Artist Statement

My work explores the often fraught relationship that women have to beauty rituals, and how they navigate the contradictory spaces of self-care, grooming, and consumption. To enact a ritual that makes one feel "in control" over an ultimately fallible, imperfect body carries a certain catharsis that can be addictive. But the oppressive historical (and ever-present) cruelty of beauty standards and the struggle of women to approximate them can often turn these moments of adornment into self-defeating experiences of ritualized alienation.

I’ve noticed how the process of painting myself takes me through the same stages of making myself up, with the attendant processes of de-familiarization, focused examination, and ultimately satisfaction (or despair with failure) as the process of doing an extensive beauty ritual. As Lionel Shriver describes the sensation of feeling beautiful, it is a "short-lived, little crack high" - and very similar to my elation when finishing a "good" painting. "Painting one’s face" in the mirror, and also literally painting one’s face on a canvas, both involve this confrontation of the body, with its objectification in the gaze of another, and myself looking at myself as an object. Afterwards, there is the confused subsequent navigation of an ambivalent, contested space to chase this fulfilling "high."

Examination of oneself in the mirror is entering a liminal space- rife with potential and desire, and sometimes terror. Self-care is to live in the fantasy of control, while acknowledging its ultimate failure, since marginal change is always charged with the desire for and failure to truly achieve dramatic transformation. Through my work, I am crafting a visual language and acknowledgement of this confrontation, with the hope that this material labor will lend further understanding to the abstract experience, and labor, of navigating this liminal and ritualized space as a woman artist and painter of women.

For more information, visit www.megankoth.com.