Centering on women’s empowerment, Amer’s practice is a corrective to the male-dominated history of Western art.
The sculptures in the artist’s “Paravent Girls” series(2021-23) began their lives as abandoned cardboard boxes before embarking on a rich material journey that ushered them into their final bronze form. On the surface of the flattened boxes, the artist drew the faces of anonymous women, the excess ink from her deceptively simple line drawings trailing delicately down the corrugated texture of the box’s surface. Amer transfers these tender portraits to clay, redrawing each figure’s features by hand in relief in the soft, earthen material. Finally cast in bronze, the form and memory of the cardboard boxes from which the works were originally made are retained.
This body of work exemplifies Amer’s long-standing interest in the gaze and the power dynamics invested in the act of looking.