The Symmetrical Bodies project focuses on the female form as a contemporary object onto which cultural projections of beauty, desire, and perfection transform the body itself into something disquieting and awesome, sublime even. Combining photography and painting, my process is both research-based and studio-oriented. The photographic element preserves the pixelated origin of the mass-produced image while the hand-painted element links to the history of painting and portraiture. When one side of a body is isolated and then mirrored, a purely symmetrical new body emerges which amplifies and reveals extreme idealizations of the female body. Works are organized into taxonomic groups: Les Célèbres, The Headless Woman, The Curiouser and most recently My Teenage Years. 

Based on print media aimed at the female consumer, I study how historical images of commerce reinforce practiced, learned and culturally accepted poses and gestures while clothing design both showcases and runs counter to projections of the female ideal (e.g. signaling beauty, virtue, purity, passivity, nurturance, modesty…). As an example, physically restricting, wasp-waist couture has matched social expectations and accepted roles for women across time periods, from centuries ago to its reintroduction by Dior in the 1940s as the New Look and now again promoted in (some) fashion today. A counter example is the bloomer which made it possible for women to be ‘modest’ while riding a bicycle or playing sports. Commercially driven self-fashioning, fast fashion and concomitantly - planned obsolescence, can be traced at least as far back to the 17th century in France and England (e.g., popular prints documented royal court fashion and its influences on aspirational fashion for both men and women wearing the latest trend). Seeking through lines to our own contemporary times, my archival focus is the 20th century; first with mid-century magazines my mother would have read which ultimately led me to revisiting artifacts from my own formative years. Familiar and recognizable, these images have been consumed, catalogued and populate a collective Rolodex of expectations. 

Project images reflect, reveal, preserve and contort the long and persistent shelf life of culturally constructed models of beauty, attractiveness and accepted behaviors and roles within the female and domestic realms.