What / How / Why - November 30, 2016

In my current work I'm collecting images from the internet showing beauty queens in their crowning moment. I concentrate on the moment where their faces seem to loose control over their prettiness and start distorting. I cut out the context of the beauty contest by zooming into the faces and getting rid of obvious signifiers such as earrings. What is left are images with obvious artifacts depicting faces of women who you can still identify as American expressing ecstatic emotions.

I aim on presenting the images in larger than life-sized, color, full-bleed mounted on something heavy leaning against the wall so you can see many of them at once, ideally being surrounded by them.

Taking away the context of the beauty contest and the obvious signifiers the depicted emotions are reinterpretated and become ambiguous . Euphoria turns into horror. For me the images are a comment on current political developments with Trump becoming the American president. It seems like these women foreshadow something dark about to happen. I also feel as if these women comment on their own situation being trapped as barbie dolls in a patriarchic system depended on others to value them based on their attractiveness. The images speak for themselves for me it's just a matter of giving them room and placing them.

WHY —

These women foreshadow a possible end point in western culture. While not intentionally political, the subject matter speaks a larger political situation that touches on a wide variety of sociological themes problematic in the commodification of beauty and gender. The familiarity of the images touch on enforced gender roles in western society. The women in these images almost have an unspoken knowledge of something that they can’t talk about, like brainwashed people realizing for a moment they are caught in this society that for a moment have time to express the horror of their situation.

Relation to text —

How to apply queer theory/strategy to work without explicitly depicting queer imagery. In a certain manner, all effective art should come from a place of queer theory that questions political power relationships. By recontextualizing these images of beauty queens collected together in a moment of vulnerability and actual emotion, Paula hopes to empower these women as actual human beings, removed of cuteness and the attachments of the power relationship to the pageant.

Relation to other peoples work?