“Symmetrical Bodies” continue Sue Johnson’s exploration of the idealization and mechanicalization of the female body as these modern tendencies intersect with consumer culture. In this series of portraits, the artist pushes the limits of how symmetry is associated with beauty and attraction. It is well known from recent studies that facial symmetry increases attractiveness ratings in human faces and appears to play a greater role in judgments of beauty concerning female faces. These surreal images feel both familiar and unsettling as the entire body is presented as a symmetric portrait with amplified, mirror reflected gestures and poses. Johnson selects images from her extensive collection of mid-twentieth century women's magazines, a process that creates for her an autobiographic time machine in which she encounters publications that would have been read by her mother, and whose cultural lessons she absorbed and passed on to her young daughter. In our age of increasing AI and robotics, it may seem as though the images have been machine-generated to achieve their symmetry, but they are hand-wrought using a simple cut and paste digital method. After creating the image, Johnson makes a photocopy and transfers the image with acrylic painting mediums onto paper which has been mounted on a wood panel. The next step is unique hand-painting in acrylic and wax mediums. These small images are then used to create the digital files to create large-scale dye sublimation prints on translucent flag fabric.