Abstract | Artist Statement | Image Gallery | Home | Close Portfolio (and return to SMP index) Artist Statement
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I began my St. Mary’s Project with an interest in toys and the messages
they can convey. I thought about the connection between toys and children’s
development and believe game playing is a major way we humans engage in
and learn about life. A child's play is often a way they train for adulthood.
Issues of gender development are what began to interest me most. Gender
identity is very much shaped by the games and toys that children play
with. When children play with toys like tea sets and easy-bake ovens they
model themselves in domestic roles at an early age. Boys playing with
airplanes and fire engines imagine being heroes and being tough, strong
men. I believe that children’s toys reinforce, if not create, much
of the gender stereotypes that exist in our culture. Gender is not only
about a person’s sexual identity; it is at the root of all natural
and learned behaviors, social roles, and cultural assumptions. Play is
actually a big part of our culture and our adulthood even after those
stuffed animals and toy trains have been put away in boxes in the attic.
Our culture accepts and encourages the way toys shape the gender of their
children. Teaching young girls how to be like Martha Stewart and boys
how to be firemen is the norm in our society. Teaching boys how to be
boys and girls how to be girls is a very divided lesson that is shaped
by game playing in our society. Gender difference is first learned through
childhood play and then acted out in later years. I explore these issues
of gender and childhood in my work by re-contextualizing and transforming
the very toys that shape us so. A number of previous works I've made lead up to this current interest.
Last year, I created a digital photography series called Behind the Portrait
(Spring 2002). This work is comprised of a number of old-fashioned portraits
as seen from the back of the figure instead of the front. The series brought
unseen parts of the portrait to the surface. These back views reveal hidden aspects not visible from the front; figures
with knives, unzipped dresses, handcuffed wrists, and crossed fingers.
A hint about these individuals’ real identities was literally hidden
behind their backs. A smiling face disguised the fact that a person was
hiding a butcher knife. These pieces told a story about a secret identity
or lifestyle that no one really knew about. These secrets are not discernable
when a person is judged at face value. This idea of something hiding behind surface appearance continued in
the fall of this year with my piece The Cookbook (Fall 2002). The Cookbook
was a piece that I created by altering an old cookbook which was filled
with photographs of women being happy homemakers and innocent wives cooking
Thanksgiving dinners. I replaced some of these pictures with photographs
of sexually lascivious people with whips and chains. The piece shows the
possibilities of what these old-fashioned housewives might have been hiding.
According to The Cookbook, they were hiding outrageous sexual practices
and naughtiness. Echoes of the saying: "you can't judge a book by
its cover" resonated in both of these works. These two early pieces
involved photographic manipulations with the goal of subverting the apparent
subject matter in a darkly humorous way. The innocence of a cookbook and
a classic portrait masked the true character of the subjects. In a way,
my intrigue with identity began with the creation of these pieces. These
works are about things not being what they appear to be and thus are about
how we judge or misjudge the nature of something based on appearances
and assumptions. What do you do that no one knows about? How wrong are
people about you? We often misjudge others, but are making judgments a
wrong thing to do? When we make judgments and assumptions about people
not based on superficial information we tend to err into the realm of
stereotypes. If we try to look a little deeper maybe we’ll find those
hidden traits about a person that are valuable, not just how they look
or dress, but who they really are. Addressing the problems of stereotypes became a central focus in my work. While the humorous aspect of my work led me to thinking about games and ultimately game playing with toys. When one makes generalizations about someone's identity based on standardized ideas of type they are making stereotypes. Stereotypes are not just generalized judgments made by others, they can also affect the way individuals define themselves. If one does not conform to existing stereotype he or she risks being considered not normal and called an outsider or a freak. We stereotype so that it makes judging and categorizing easier. Gender stereotypes often force us into this sort of standardization. Male and female stereotypes tend to be very polarized and there is great pressure for children at an early age to adhere to the “normal” behaviors of male or female and not be out of place. A crucial moment for me came to me on a visit to my local Target store. I made this fieldtrip because I was exploring ideas of play for my work. I remember walking through the children’s home furnishing aisle and looking down aisle F4. There were two sides of this aisle, on the right were the pink and purple accessories and on the left the blue and maroon ones. Not only were the colors suggesting gender polarization, but also the images on these accessories possessed were themed only for boys or only for girls. Why did these common furnishings have to instill such opposing characteristics into children? Children are placed into molds to be either male or female; anything in between the lines isn’t encouraged.
As play wrestling in a young bear’s life prepares it for fighting
in future rumbles, toys also prepare children in the ways of being adults.
Children’s toys are mostly gendered and assigned to either girls
or boys and are rarely unsexed. I am working with toys because they are
a way we first become indoctrinated to many of the rules of real-life
(1). I am interested in how they maybe train us, at an early age, to be
masculine or feminine in adult society. Toys and play are tools that help
teach us the 'norms' of gender identity. My work aims to subvert the stereotypes
our society teaches about gender. I use found objects that have certain
associations with happy and innocent childhoods, which include games,
toys, and candies. These toys might at first glance seem innocent but
after closer inspection one sees the toys have been altered sometimes
in ways that seem the opposite of innocent. People's first impulse to
interact with something cuddly might suddenly switch to repulsion. The
playful natures of the pieces disguise the real subject that they are
being used for. In Gummy Orgy (Spring 2003), gummy worms, which are innocent
non-sexed candies shaped into worms are arranged into masses of very sexualized
poses. A bowl full of candy gets transformed into a mass of sexualized
creatures. A person would no longer want to eat these gummy worms after
seeing them in action. The innocence is lost even in candy when a sex
is attached to it. Wanting to apply gender to everything can have its
adverse effects. While gender rules are taught, the sexualized aspect
of gender is always avoided. An artist that shows similar concerns of childhood and categorization
is Mike Kelley. Mike Kelley’s work titled Craft Morphology Flow Chart
(1991) uses stuffed toys that have been separated into groups and catalogued
in black and white photographs. These innocent stuffed animals have been
put into classes or races as if they were different specimens of plants
or animals. The stuffed sock monkeys are separate from the green hand
puppets because they’re not alike. Stuffed fabric can even be judged
and categorized, not just people. The categorizations of toys into types
are, for Kelley, a metaphor for the foundation of any type including race,
class, and gender. In my piece, Accessorized Fuzzy Love (Spring 2003)
I transform two non-sexed stuffed animals to take on sexual characteristics.
As Kelley’s work suggests, society wants to split everything up into
categories of type. In my work, I too offer up a genderized difference.
By making the unisex toy sexed, it falls into what society wants to do
everything, which is to categorize. By applying sexual characteristics
to these stuffed animals, I have also opened up the possibility of their
sexual nature. Kelley also transforms toys to sexualize them in his pieces
Dialogue No. 7, 5, and 4 (1991). In these pieces, he takes normal stuffed
animals, places them on top of a blanket, and near a boom box. The boom
box has recordings of adult conversations meant to be a narrative between
the two stuffed animals. These pieces with stuffed animals talking dirty
show the loss of innocence of childhood play. (2) Artist like Cindy Sherman and Mariko Mori also use the element of role-playing and gender identity in their work. Both artists make photographs of themselves dressed-up as specific female types to show their comments on culture and women. This role-playing is like the game of dress-up. Pretending to be someone else is a way of playing a role in a huge imaginary game. Mori has a piece that is titled Play with Me (1994), where she is dressed up as a cyborg and is waiting in front of an arcade (5). The piece is a comment on Japanese women as a metaphor for their role in contemporary Japan. Dressing up as a cyborg makes her look like a toy that was influenced by technology. The Western world’s technology makes altering and designing people possible. In Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills 1977-1982,she dresses herself up as different type of heroines from pretend movies of the Alfred Hitchcock era (4). By dressing up as different types of women, she allows the audience to gaze upon the different aspects of being a woman. Her pieces deal with women being the object of the gaze in our society. She dresses up as different types of women such as the blonde librarian or the nosy mystery solver. She photographs herself as sixty-nine types of movie heroines to fulfill different clichés. The gender role modeling shows the different stereotypes of women, such as being demure or air-headed. Both artists use a playful nature and technique to show their views on women and their roles in society. In my piece Dressed to be, I have taken children’s clothes and altered them slightly to include the labels of XX or XY chromosomes. It comments on the how we take on our roles of gender with children’s clothes along with toys. Although I don’t have a piece where people actually dress up and take on roles, the clothes represent the dressing up that Sherman and Mori do so well.
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