Beige is an exploration of the body, gender politics, and contemporary womanhood through the lens of non-traditional self-portraiture. In this solo exhibition, Lainie Ettema invites viewers to engage in dialogue surrounding conformity, representation, and defiance.

Employing silicone as a fake “skin,” Ettema’s mixed media works blur the line between authenticity and artifice. Skin becomes a boundary, a surface that embodies both power and vulnerability, resistance, and absorption. Denoting a sanitized, minimalist appearance, the color beige recently has become aestheticized in realms such as interior design, clothing, and children’s toys. Yet, like beige, women too are expected to blend in—to be accommodating and unobtrusive as to not be seen as too bossy or too quiet, too prudish, or too scandalous. A beige girl is a clean girl is a perfect girl.  

Through her work, Ettema critiques what she refers to as “beigeness,” a condition imposed by the male gaze and patriarchal structures. It is a veneer of polished, neutral, and contained fakeness that silences the nuance and power underlying womanhood. This show, however, at its core, is as much about resistance as it is about oppression. By hybridizing, halting time, and embracing the monstrous, these works explore what it might mean to find empowerment in the fragment.