Please Note … Limit of Two Per Customer

Female Comes In Many Forms, 2019
Four color risograph print
17 x 11 inches

Numbered and signed
Edition of 200

Designed and produced in collaboration with Topic Media.
Read more about their Federal Project No. 2 — here.

One of three prints. View others — here.

”I became familiar with WPA posters as a kid. For me they held a similar fascination as comics; they were a bold form of graphic storytelling that often used a tongue-in-cheek humor to talk about the experience of being human—whether it was caring for your neighbor, breastfeeding your baby, or treating your syphilis.

I’ve used a similar humor and directness as a starting point to explore the human condition in my work. However, the posters I ended up making for Federal Project Number Two don’t contain the same form of humor that drew me to the originals—there was something in the making of these images that called more for tenderness than irony.

Each of my posters carries a different message, all following a thread of tolerance and humanism. It seems obvious to state something as simple as “all love is equal,” but it also feels like a very necessary PSA right now.

The media’s portrayal of gender—not just of women, but of the whole spectrum of gender—needs to change. There are many ways to be a man or a woman, to be non-binary, to be attracted to other people. Gender is complex, and these complexities are always shifting. When social communication is based on traditional interpretations of gender, the identities of male and female become rigid archetypes. This sort of messaging fragments our potential as humans. It becomes the dictator of normalcy, an inescapable whisper of how we are supposed to function in the world.

My work is about the experience of being human. It would be impossible to explore this without also considering the context of the world we live in and the events that shape us.

When making works about motherhood, I consider gender politics and social policies that effect mothers—like the recent separation of families at the border. I would say the female figures in my work act as vessels—carriers for narrative told through emotion. The narrative is rarely explicit, more so it’s implied by the thought that there is a thought—the glint of an eye, or smile, or finger ready to move. The figures are there to remind us of feeling.”

— Koak