Jane Maxwell

Jane Maxwell uses collage to comment on the media and fashion industry’s obsession with female beauty. To create her multifaceted works, she begins by gluing together up to six layers of images pulled from old magazines and papers sourced from places like the Brimfield Antiques Fair. She then cuts into the surface, revealing the materials below, building up and peeling back, sanding and adding melted beeswax, before finishing the work with high-gloss resin. Maxwell often works with fashion imagery, deconstructing highly manufactured images of women—models, starlets, and other icons—replacing sexy clothing with layers of vintage produce labels, old Hollywood posters, and other related materials, and using repetition to underscore contemporary culture’s insistence on idealization and conformity.