Jamie Ciarmataro

2022 Senior Exhibition Artists

Jamie Ciarmataro

Art + Design: Photography

About Jamie Ciarmataro

Jamie Ciarmataro is a graduating senior at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she will receive her BFA in Photography with a minor in Art History. Most of Jamie’s work has been centered around breaking societal norms having to do with the standards set for women. For her final senior body of work, Kitty Likes To Scratch, Jamie explores how women have been/are used by the advertising industry to create consumer desire and the promise of satisfaction. She was able to accomplish this through creating both a comical inverse to the original advertisement, and amplifying the aspects of emotional fulfillment toward the products depicted.

Statement

Kitty Likes To Scratch

I am interested in the history of how women are represented within the realm of advertising, particularly from media produced within the mid-twentieth century.

I have always been surprised by advertisements I have seen, particularly early and mid 20th century ads, both printed and digital, that seem to either sexualize women to sell a product and/or use women or female models to make the products seem more desirable and exciting to viewers and consumers than they really are.

With my body of work, I am parodying these ads with facial expressions and poses that emanate either the opposite reaction as the original advertisement, or exaggerating the reactions that the women were having in the original. In doing so, I am attempting a satirical approach to how women models have been used to benefit major corporations by making their products, such as vacuums and Tide Pods, seem highly desirable items and consumers are to be ridiculously satisfied with receiving the particular product as a gift or buying it for themselves. My influences are Celeste Barber, who plays with self-promotional, self-shot videos made by women selling their allure or talents. Barber’s instagram is dedicated to taking photos produced for social media and remaking them in a way that looks more ‘real,’ and turning them into comedy rather than touched up and edited to be perfect. Along with Barber, I am interested in Marilyn Minter’s approach to her work. Specifically, how passionately the women are interacting with the materials being cleaned off the glass slate. I want my work to be emotional, while being witty and lighthearted.

Ads that immediately caught my eye for this body of work were for Tide from the 1950s, Love’s Baby Soft from the 1970s, Hoover vacuum cleaners from the 1950s, Tampax from the 1960s to the present, and other advertisements for household appliances and beauty products.

I decided to take two different approaches to this body of work, one being more similar to Barber with creating the comical inverse to the original, and the other being similar to Minter, an amplification of the original women’s emotion toward the product.