Debby Friday has shared her startling new ‘WHAT A MAN’ video.
The Toronto based artist’s debut album is out now, a terrific piece of multi-faceted electronic songwriting. Extra-dimensional pop music, every aspect of Debby Friday’s music feels exacting, perfectly weighted and thought-through.
Album standout ‘WHAT A MAN’ has just received the full video treatment, directed by Debby Friday and Kevan Funk. Cross-referencing the concept of the ‘male gaze’ – as defined by art critic John Pilger – with the artworks of Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (in particular, her iconic painting Judith Slaying Holofernes).
A striking watch, it moves between the groundbreaking and the classic. Debby Friday comments…
Both the essay and the paintings served as frameworks for the video. The same way that Gentileschi painted herself into images of other women is the same way I feel that every woman can see ourselves in much of Gentileschi’s story and her work. To be a woman and an artist in this world is to be, in a way, a shapeshifter. You take on the shape of whatever and whoever is looking at you – whether that be a camera, a phone, a lover, a thief, a killer. Always and all at once, you are a spectacle, a flower, a treasure, a ditch, a bitch, a miracle.
When I look at Artemisia’s paintings, I feel myself transported and transformed into the emotional field of Judith, of Jael, of Susanna. Her hand is my hand, her sword is my sword, her pain is my pain. I have always identified with women who were wild and brazen – survivors, people who exist and persist despite. I have always looked up to women who were willing to be ‘bad’ in the name of living thoroughly.
Check out ‘WHAT A MAN’ below – Debby Friday plays a short string of UK shows in May, catch those after the jump.
Catch Debby Friday at the following shows:
May
2 Bristol Crofters Rights
3 London Corsica Studios w/ Grove
11 Leeds Headrow House
12 Manchester The White Hotel
Photo Credit: Chinelo Yasin
