ARTIST STATEMENT

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Big Night For You? Boxes: I, II, III, IV, consist of four sculptural design objects inspired by the 1929 silent film Die Büsche der Pandora. The film explores the complexities and tragic consequences of glamour through the eyes of Lulu, the young protagonist, whose objectification by others ruins her and those around her.  The piece includes four rigid, rectangular, wooden, and reflective surfaces that hang on the wall.  The boxes are photo-printed mirrors that utilize the 1929 movie as graphic source material for a collage composition. Distorted images printed within the object reflect the inherent fragmentation of glamour, its obsession with mirrors, and the veneer of material illusions.

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This mode of presentation invites an interactive exploration of the work, where the viewer becomes a voyeur and the object entraps the images and the viewer. Intended to serve as a mirror reflecting society’s inflated value of glamour, imbued in image-sculpture hybrids, the work alludes to both the commodified and commercialized nature of glamour and the entrapment of its participants in its illusions.

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While there is an awareness of the pleasures inherent in glamour as luxury, its commercial and social value, and the implied feeling of self-worth, there is generally limited appreciation of its illusions and limitations. This work explores the pretense of glamour - how it hides desire beneath layers and via a fragmenting and alienating process.  Glamour isn’t pure, original, and whole. Rather, it is imagined and worked at, a man-made contraption.  There is sadness inherent in glamour, including a fear of loss, desire, anxiety, and the conflict between what is and what should be.  At the same time, glamour, with its fetishes and compulsions, attempts to ward off these negative feelings.  Steeped in psychological complexity, glamour exists in a field of the imagination, experimenting with new identities and fleeing towards an imagined ideal.