"Uphill Battle - A Woman's Burden to Keep Up with Society's Standard of Beauty"

For my 1st project, Parameters, I chose to use non-traditional materials as an artistic sculptural piece. I was not thrilled with the idea of coming up with something for this. I am a very traditional artist, so outside of a canvas, or sketch pad is outside my comfort zone....good! I needed to be stretched artistically.

My piece "Uphill Battle" is a collection of items and pictures that depict the way that so many of us women try to compete with an airbrushed world of beauty. This reminded me of a documentary I watched last summer called "More Human than Human" it showed how we as society, throughout history, have improved on humanity by artistically altering the appearance of human subjects in artwork. Today's advertising agencies still follow this practice.

What does this mean to us, and how do I depict it it my piece? I started with a Barbie doll. Growing up, I wanted to look just like Barbie or a Disney princess, neither of which are feasable nor anatomically correct. Couple this with psychotic mothers who run the pageant circuit with their small children and you have a recipe for future low self esteem and a lifetime of eating disorders.

My piece moves upward from small girls dolled up and airbrushed, a barbie with eyelash adhesive in her lap, and various items young girls play with to look pretty. Moving up, I took pictures of models, again airbrushed, and surrounded them with cosmetics, a corset, and tanning creme. Notice the ridiculous picture of the teenager with cosmetic surgery notes scrawled with arrows. As you progress up, there are more pictures, this time of celebrities that have altered their appearance with cosmetic surgery. They do not even come close to the airbrushed models in the previous step. I replaced the cosmetics with needles, beauty creme, an oxygen tube, and a tube of polident. I intentionally haphazardly tore out the pictures to show the carelessness of the obsessive march upward.

Although I wear cosmetics and "doll myself up", I do so in an artistic expression. I admit that when Juviderm commercials aired and proclaimed that "parenthesis belonged on paper, not on your face", I looked in the mirror and gasped. I did not even realize it was an issue until they pointed it out! Now, I laugh at my reaction. I embrace my age (although I do not feel I look anywhere near it), I may not grow old gracefully, but I will not obsess my way toward plastic surgery!