To contact the artist please email cianabelle@gmail.com or call 843.801.2213. Prices quoted on site are for unframed pieces; a small shipping fee may apply. Cash or check are accepted in person and PayPal is accepted online.
Visit the blog here. Visit the Etsy store here. Ciana Pullen is an award-winning artist who lives in Charleston, SC and blogs about contemporary portraiture and Charleston art at Post-. She earned her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC. in 2007, after studying fine art. Since then she has worked with nonprofit community art groups and museums and has shown prints and paintings in Knew Gallery, Kathleen Ewing Gallery, the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, Tivoli Studios & Gardens, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She cannot remember a time, even in early childhood, when she was not drawing and painting people and everything else possible, but she officially began working with portraiture in 1999. In 2008 she founded the Charleston Figure Drawing Group as a resource for local artists and became involved in the Charleston arts community through interning with Eye Level Art, doing portraiture at the Charleston Farmer's Market and Market Street, participating in Tivoli Studios & Gardens, and blogging about local and contemporary art at cianapullen.blogspot.com. Today she accepts private commissions and sketches portraits around Charleston and for events. To contact the artist, please email cianabelle@gmail.com or call 843.801.2213.
Artist's Statement:
In college I developed a conceptual project that re-examines the role of viewer, artist, subject and the Art Institution in portraiture. I wasn't sure where I was going with this but I chose several of my close friends who are not visual artists in real life and imagined what type of work they would make if they had gone to art school with me. I set about creating the work that I believed "Mark," "Valerie" and "Alice" would have created as a way of building a portrait of each friend. I kept "sketchbooks," built "portfolios," held "group exhibitions," even created several fake applications to graduate programs. I became more and more interested in how the heavy-handed Art Insitituion-- the college, the tradition of critique, the exhibition space, the entire industry built on the tacit assumptions of what is or isn't fine art-- affected the turnout of each character. With this project I got to create fake artistic trajectories, fake criticism, fake press, even a full-length fake documentary about the "Corcoran Three." What had started as simply a means to make artwork for the characters had become an insitutional critique. I wasn't sure why I was pursuing this but working as several people at once simply felt right. I loved it. My teachers didn't.
It finally clicked after I became interested in social justice and sociology (feminism, racial equality, and gender equality in particular). W.E.B. du Bois's description of living behind a "veil", where the one who wears the veil can see through but others cannot see him, as a means to describe how stereotypes can make certain people invisible and create a double life for the person behind the "veil," really shocked me. It didn't seem like the kind of thing you could say out loud. I thought about how the society I live in offers one standard from which most people-- women, people of color, people with disabilites, poor people, gay people, fat people, and many, many more-- are "deviants" or "others." I identified with that experience having attended a girl's middle- and high school where a wealthy, white, thin, Southern heritage was the norm which I both participated in and very much deviated from. That a dominant group should never question itself but other groups must learn to perform an indentity that caters to the dominant group while at the same time experiencing their own point of view: suddenly it made sense why I was making art in character.
Today I still keep sketchbooks for "Mark," "Valerie" and "Alice," but I've also begun exploring race and gender in the media through painting and collage. I tried only working with gender but found it was impossible to separate from race, as depicted in the media. Complex sociological narratives aren't just found in textbooks, they are all over magazines, advertisements and TV, but they usually go unnoticed by those who consume the messages. I like to manipulate print media just enough to point these things out, make the hidden message obvious or twist it in an unexpected way. Many of my collages turn out grotesque but as I see it the source material is already grotesque. Taking things out of context only highlights the context: if something is gross, what does it say about a context in which gross stuff is ok?
I've also returned to more traditional portraiture, trying to connect with others outside of this framework. I write about all these ideas, contemporary portraiture and the Charleston art scene at my blog called Post-.
