2024 Portrait Prize WINNER: “Exhibit in Reversal” by Lillian Emerick Valentine
It’s time to congratulate the WINNER of the Frontier Poetry 2024 Portrait Prize Contest, Lillian Emerick Valentine. Their gripping poem, “Exhibit in Reversal” was selected by our editorial team.
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy ….You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
— Margaret Atwood
When we think of a portrait, do we think of something beautiful as well as consensual? Do we imagine whose portrait gets taken, whose gaze becomes satiated? Valentine addresses the proverbial male gaze, even as it exists as high “culture” in places of history, class, and art. She reclaims the portraiture of women, not as a voyeuristic look at the female form, but as someone who has a gaze of her own, who peers back at onlookers and reclaims slack jawed awe and desire. Valentine’s work is notable for a seemingly impossible feat. Using humor and a command of craft, Valentine refuses to become her own voyeur. She refuses to become, as Atwood asserts, “a woman with a man inside watching a woman.”
Join Valentine in that refusal below.
Exhibit in Reversal
after the artist Crista Ann Ames
The ceramicist reminds us that lips are rounded
to cover the teeth and adds, sculpt them as the inside
of the mouth rolled out, providing the requisite curtains
of flesh bumped beyond the staged opening of tongue
and teeth. The ceramicist is re-making traditional
sculptures in different genders—currently Rodin’s
The Thinker as a woman in her third trimester. It remains
inconceivable to me how many modern art museums
persist in displaying a hanging ballsack, as if
a fabric scrotum is somehow edgy. Years ago,
gelatinous rubber testicles suspended at the VAG—
Vancouver Art Gallery—were notable mostly
for the older man nabbing photos of me through it
who then tried to follow me home. The balls were, irrevocably,
blue, and thinking of it now as a gender-flip
I include the art, so it is I, then barely twenty one,
taking photos of him through the baby blue
vulva. Is that how we take back our agency,
by switching it like that? I’m asking
an honest question. Or is the switch about an exposure
of understanding—revealing to the man
how it felt to be followed gallery to gallery
and photographed without giving consent? The visiting
exhibit was—how could it not be?—Rodin. I saw
the melting marble Danaid where he makes stone
run like water until it hits the rough borders of stone
again in a sensual display of despair. A photo
version hung in my aunt’s spare room and I had fallen
in love with the woman’s spine, and written prettily
about it. Had masturbated to it. I tried to give the man
the slip near a plaque on the mythological
Danaids, women known for their wedding-night
murder of their husbands. Lips are rounded to cover
the teeth and her body is humped to conceal, what
the ceramicist does not say. She does not say if
she started sculpting because she too had been
watched and wanted her own space to do the watching,
or if she had seen a desolated glory like Danaid,
and had desired that beautiful woman as her own.
Lillian Emerick Valentine
Lillian is a poet and farmer from Oregon. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and her work has been published in Ecotone, The Journal, Salamander, and other literary journals. Her favorite bird is a kingfisher.
