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Kauffmann’s work addresses the contemporary performance of self as it relates to femme representation, social media, and reality television. She is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, installation, video, and a variety of digital mediums. Her drawing practice functions as an inquiry into the representation of femme emotion and hysteria in both art history and popular culture.

 

The artist started her instagram @ucannysfvalley in 2014, which includes GIFs and collages created using only her iPhone and found images. @ucannysfvalley serves as an intervention into the online representation of women. Using depictions of women often authored by men, Kauffmann supplants their original meaning, recontextualizing them within a framework of her own imagination. She employs sparkly, pink, feminine coded aesthetics, commonly associated with cultural constructs of superficiality. She uses these aesthetics of surface material to subvert attachments of emotive representations of femme identity to frivolity, revealing a more thoughtful and sinister reality. 

 

Kauffmann graduated with an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2020. She has had solo shows in galleries and institutions in the USA and Bahrain and has participated in multiple group shows internationally. 

 

This artist has been presented to you by Geena Brown, curator, and writer based in New York. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University and a BA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is Assistant Director at Lyles & King in New York.