Minna Väisänen: Nainen, Valtiatar -naistenlehti / Woman, Mistress – women´s magazine

Completion year: 2011

Technique: Digital print

The phrase "women's magazine" sounds exciting. Are women's magazines so feminine that men do not understand them? I decided to explore deeper into the world of these magazines. I collected a series of articles from summer of 2010. I extracted text and made new images for a new "women's magazine".
This four-page magazine consists of an introduction describing the process and an article entitled "Mistress". I rewrote the story from a couple of Finnish women's magazines (women’s consumer magazines). The artwork is from real stories and photographs. I staged the photographs and photographed the images again as some kind of pastiche. Then I painted these images into silhouettes. The postures remained the same as found in the original stories. From each article, I chose the text to create a narrative story. For the story, I organized the texts from the articles. From these collected texts, I created a new narrative story. In the Woman's magazines, there were several stories about success and family. Therefore, I specifically took fragments of those stories to represent "Mistress."

One reason to make such an artwork was my desire to become more familiar with women's magazines. I wanted to observe the world perspective that is produced and maintained in these magazines. Of course, every magazine has its own readers. However, I was looking for the parallels between stories.

Artist's page