Posted inArt

Kate Durbin Finds Virtual Moments of Adolescent Vulnerability in “Girls, Online”

Artist and writer Kate Durbin is both a scavenger and connoisseur of the Internet. She prowls the immaterial space, searching for images that express the emotional lives of adolescent girls. It was on Facebook that I first noticed a link to Durbin’s project “Girls, Online,” a collection of anonymous Tumblr posts from teenage girls that she assembled for Chris Higgs’s website Bright Stupid Confetti. Durbin captures the blogs and reblogs of sensitive adolescent teens and tweens, women-born-women, trans bois and gay boys. Her main focus, however, is on adolescent girls who are subject to the male gaze. The teenage girls she sees float about in that in-between space of clinging to girlhood and transforming into women.