Stage Presence

In contemporary society, the mass media, pop culture, and the beauty industries drive the framework of images that encourages Western culture’s fascination and obsession with the female form. The framing of contemporary woman through images creates a fractured impression of the identity of woman. This framework of images exposes the awkward tension between the audience and the process of signification that occurs between the body and images. Feminist writers including Laura Mulvey, Judith Williamson, and Judith Butler discussed various aspects of the relationship between object and subject in female representation. In both senses of the word “image”, our image-conscious culture constructs identity through what we see in images. Women are particularly associated with being recipients of the gaze, while the image of woman is continuously manipulated into a specific, idealized kind of beauty image. The American beauty pageant system is one facet of Western culture that drives the function of woman as the recipient of the gaze while reinforcing the standards associated with a search for a woman or child winning at beauty. The imagery of beauty pageants inspired my current paintings, where I appropriate images of beauty queens from the Internet and juxtapose them with symbols that refer to Grimm’s fairy tales. I will present my current body of work as a narrative that exposes the vehicle of the beauty pageant as a mechanism for control, societal influence, and pressure while demonstrating the depths reached by the myth of perfect beauty