Artist Statement: Undressed
Clothing signals a human wearer. Encounters with dress divorced from the body are strangely alienating.

Fashion plays on the anxieties about individuality and self-expression, which it both stimulates and condemns. Framing the body, dress insulates the individual while simultaneously connecting individuals to the collective. At the root of fashion is the contradictory injunction that the individual should both stand out from the crowd and merge with it.

Building on its paradoxical nature, fashion is ultimately about being undressed. The fascination of veiling lies in unveiling. Glimpses of the body activate a desire to reveal portions screened by clothing. Thus, the absent body is immensely more enticing than its present counterpart.

Exploring beauty and the signals of body language, the images call attention to the extent that clothing and fashion sway female attitudes and understandings. Fashion tends to treat the body as mere mannequin – it is the clothing rather than the wearing of it that is purportedly significant. But on the runway, only certain bodies appear. The desire becomes not so much to wear the outfits as to accrue the status that beauty and conformity offer — it is to reach for the unattainable body and to punish the inevitable failure to achieve it.

Artist Statement: Grave Gardens
Ceramic bouquets permanently add color to the stones of death. They were never alive and yet out of them, over time, new life has begun to grow. The plastic and fabric flowers mix in with the freshly cut and decaying roses. There is no line between what is and what was, between life and death, between reality and artificiality.

These are the gardens of the cemetery, the colors with which we adorn our dead. Dying bouquets mix with those that will never live, strangely revealing a crossover so inbred that what is fake and what is real becomes a matter only of perspective and degree. The plastic and silks are admirably real at the same time that real bouquets become increasingly fake, an amalgam of organic material and chemical tooling. But the markers of time disrupt this aim for sterile flawlessness. The trees shed their coats and new seeds mix birth with burial. Lichen and grasses have added their own lettering to the tombs. Even the sun bleached and frayed faux flowers seem to die.

Artist Statement: Role Model 1 & 2
She was beautiful and happy. Or so it seemed. It was almost as if those characteristics should be intrinsically linked. We so crave beauty, that it most certainly should secure our smile. She was held up to me as one to imitate. Her boisterous personality and forever optimistic grin a model to follow. And a model she was — my father’s model. He photographed her because she was beautiful.

But I photographed her because that beauty didn’t make either of us happy. She lived a rough life stained with secrets beneath contrived rosy cheeks She stole the clothes my father thought so stylish. She exercised obsessively and lived on diet pills.
I photographed a darker beauty, one lost in loneliness and struggle, both hers and mine. Photographing her outside the studio, we engage in her (and our) struggle for acceptance and happiness, beneath appearance. In reworking my father’s nudes, I strip them (and her) down to an inner core and consequence of striving for a particular body image. I seek my own safety within these beautiful paradoxes.

Artist Statement: Ladies in Waiting
Designed to sit atop the bureau, these dolls offer a miniature form of company and an incessant reminder of how we should be. Yet at our scale, they become alive, leaving the viewer to inhabit a strange crossover between our world and theirs. The deliberate nature of the poses suggests that they are the objects of someone’s gaze. Each woman is a variant of two positions, she either waits subserviently with clasped hands or offers her beauty up for display. All are waiting for the prince to come. Shrouded in a theatrical darkness with a shallow depth of field, the lighting conflates the roles of voyeurism, performance, and the feminine ideal. The images imply our own and the camera’s gazes, as well as hints of the presence of another person in the room.

The pins solidify the doll’s place as mere objects and their role as decorative. Emerging at the turn of the century and remaining through the 1920s, these pincushion dolls were designed to house hatpins. Though resembling the corsage pin, keeping the woman in place, hatpins also symbolized woman’s emancipation as wearing a hat allowed women to adopt masculine attire, and thus, masculine roles. As the early Suffragette Movement melted into the Equal Rights Movement, women increasingly challenged the Victorian division of separate spheres and began to insist that gender distinctions are artificial man-made constructions. At the same time, beauty ideals which originally derived from internal qualities such as moral character, spirituality and health, changed as these dolls reached the market and women began to think about beauty and self in ways that were more external than internal. The increased and encouraged self-scrutiny spurned self-hate. This anger surrounds the pins which violently attack the doll as ideal.

The pin suggests self-abnegation and the pains of trying to embrace the ultimately impossible feminine ideal. This reminds us that what makes these dolls so unique is that they are designed to be poked and prodded by women. Because of the phallic nature of the pin and the placement of some pins either close to the vaginal region or attacking from behind the violation also becomes sexual.
They are stand-ins and yet heavy with their own stories. The look in their eyes is foreboding, almost plotting an escape but with nowhere to go. They are marred by their own idealism. They can be read on the simple porcelain level they are or a deeper more fragmented, sexual, enticing reality they reflect.

Artist Statement: Stripped
Stripped is a two-part series of pin-cushion dolls, abrasively treated and edging between action and non-action. Shrouded in darkness their form is recognizable though distraught with a sense of wear and tear. Here the dolls, still in their deferential and performative poses, are decomposing, corroding, rotting. To show the value we place on surfaces they have been stripped literally to their surface layer as if skinned. They are bare and naked, with a nod to the sexual undertones of stripping but, theirs is a vulgar reduction to surface. There has been a meticulous stripping away of their beauty as the spots where the porcelain would have gleamed in the light is now empty black holes. Abused and deconstructed, they stare with blank eyes, literally torn from their sockets.

They play off the Ladies in Waiting by this literal deconstruction of the ideal that the dolls so vividly represent. Shifting the focus from poise and pose, to relationship and interactions they draw out two concepts latent in all the imagery. Reduced to the surface, they show the superficiality of it all.The first group of images within Stripped consists of five pairs of pincushion dolls. The emphasized surface deprives the dolls of much of their individuality and they begin to conflate with each other. Most of the pairs mimic each other in a script that calls for particular, patterned behaviors. As vague imitations of each other, they are all variants of the purported ideal. They are all engaged in a subtle struggle of competition, a clash between foreground and background referring to the unspoken wars between women to gain the praise and gaze of men. They blend together in overlapping parts suggesting their interchangeability and mocking the ridiculous need to be the queen. They are helpless reincarnations of each other as they struggle for beauty amidst their decay.The second subset of Stripped reintroduces the dolls to their traditional worlds. Objects that would typically accompany them on the shelf now loom in a play of scale and objectness. Valued on a par with shirt collars, eyeglasses and thread, they yearn for recognition but fade in and out of the foreground. The dolls are trapped between the fantastical allusion of life and the stark reality of porcelain decoration. They reference and evoke the nostalgia of an earlier era, the desire to be what once was and yet continues today. Enveloping the frame and blending together, they suggest activity within the inactive object. There is a struggle for dominance, an uncertainty and a disturbance of confusion. Mingled together they seem precarious, misfit and diminished.

Artist Statement: Made By Adults
Dolls are supposed to represent little people. They live in the worlds of childhood, as emblems of innocence inside miniature copies of the world. They are children made by adults for children. They manufacture a nostalgia and idealization of the memory of youth for the child to carry onto adulthood. Their chubby cheeks and plush lips smile with an innocence and promise of play. The doll never ages, only the memory does.

The photographs are a way of representing and preserving, a frantic attempt to preserve an ephemeral reality. They peer out to darkness, encapsulated in the frame much like a specimen encapsulated in a jar of formaldehyde. Both seek to save at the same time they show a deep loss. The soft, dim light almost tries to care for them, to preserve them from decay. Photographing in the color and light of photographs of Victorian statues also evokes the obsession with representing and presenting a prized emblem. Yet as much as we elevate these objects of childhood, we carelessly destroy them. We love them dearly but we mistreat them from a young age, brushing their hair so much it falls out, stretching them until limbs are no longer attached, and dropping them until they crack.

They are dark and confusing, abused and neglected. They are impersonations of the child world, but as they are made by adults, they carry some of the violence and sexuality from that world into the smaller, precious utopias of youth. And at the same time, a bit of childish insecurity and naivety remains with us in our adult years. These figures are the shadows of those imprints. The collision of two worlds, neither fully independent of the other. A residue that haunts like a nightmare. It draws elements from the familiar but confuses them, leaving a shiver of disturbance and unease.

Artist Statement: Makeover
My work explores how women self-destruct in the futile quest for bodily perfection. As portraits of this internal struggle, the work shows casualties from a world where beauty is paramount. All images are color photographs made from a single color negative. I appropriate images from women’s magazines and combine them with plaster, hair, silk, cloth and other elements that appeal or repulse our tactile perception. The coarse plaster, for example, evokes an abrasive roughness that counters the ideal of poreless perfection. The hair suggests the need for shaving or laser hair removal. The disjoining of these pieces further accentuates the horrors of scars and stretch marks. The body becomes unsettling because it is less than whole with orifices and textures that use beauty as an attack rather than an end in itself. The unifying amber-yellow color is both attractive and nauseating, reflecting gold we desire, but sickness we fear. The monstrous (im)possibilities evoke the paradoxical feelings of desire and repulsion, pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability, illness and vitality. The composites merge in the single color negative which I then print using traditional darkroom techniques. There are no filters or additional lighting used during the image taking, nor are they digitally manipulated.

Through projected distortions, I investigate the reality and potential of my own body image. My photographs have become surrogate self portraits- a growing body of work of the confused woman, lost, disturbed, conflicted but searching for a different vision. I stretch the skin like canvas, twisting its beauty from real to surreal. By changing the safe, reassuring, and gorgeous into the ugly, dangerous, and fascinating, I recognize how beauty is disfiguring. I am looking for my freedom by imperfecting the perfection