Amanda Charchian’s Mono Explores Female Sensuality

Name: Amanda Charchian
Project: Mono
Location: Los Angeles · United States
Words: Steph Wade

In the contemporary art world, the cultural perspective of the male gaze is consistently challenged in many different and interesting ways. Los Angeles-based photographer Amanda Charchian is an artist doing just that—her new series, titled ‘Mono’, is part of a new collection that celebrates the female gaze: art created by women, for women.

Charchian’s ‘Mono’ is part of Huxley-Parlour’s ‘The Female Lens: 9 Contemporary Female Photographers’ at the Photo London 2018 art fair. The body of work explores Charchian’s relationship to female intimacy through the use of multiple art forms, shadows, and color.

Working within the established trope of nude photography, Charchian creates almost surrealist images that confront the concept of the gaze, whilst informing our sense of abstraction through her use of geometric shapes. Cast against architectural spaces, Charchian’s black and white images are then painted on in primary colors, a technique that is attributed to her artistic inspiration, conceptual artist John Baldessari. “For me, color, texture and form are always the essential elements in art,” Charchian recently told AnOther Magazine. “How do you make something graphic feel sensual? I think everything I’ve ever made has been about intimacy”.