Recent Work: Marked

This is a parallel endeavor to the Red Lipstick Project, for which I took images from a 1938 dating guide for single women that have been circulating on the Internet, printed them out, and kissed both the female and male figures in each image. I then scanned the images and cropped/ re-printed them. Before kissing them, I had the printouts up on my studio wall for about a month, just thinking about them. Each image was originally accompanied by text, encouraging adherence to some behavioral expectation. At first, the advice, as well as the didactic imagery, struck me as darkly funny. But the more I thought about it, the more tragic it seemed. These images were being sold to women as an archetype of how women are supposed to behave when interacting with men through the lens of what men should be expected to expect. It's a thoroughly fucked cycle of atrocious expectations for both men and women. A look at the headlines of Cosmo ("6 Secrets His Body Language Gives Away"; "4 Things That Freak Guys Out on a First Date"; "How To Turn A Guy On"; "101 Sex Positions To Please Your Man"), the unfortunate modern-day equivalent of a dating guide for single women, indicates that this is still a very real, very consumable ideological pressure. So, feeling this, I felt compelled to use my red-coated lips to offer these hopeless instruments of internalized self-loathing the unqualified affection that every human being deserves. It's an exercise in mark-making and gesture that is both sincere and critical.  The titles are lifted directly from the original "advice" text of the manual.

Examples:

Careless Women Never Appeal to Gentlemen

Men Don’t Like Girls Who Borrow Their Handkerchief and Smudge Them With Lipstick

The Last Straw (Your Date Will Never Call You Again!)

I showed these, in series, as part of my post-bacc thesis show along with the Red Lipstick Project video, and some stills from that.  Here are some installation shots: