“The Sexy Sex: All-Nude Revue”
“The Sexy Sex: All-Nude Revue” (2005-present), is a body of work that contains four (three plus a study) life-sized nude self-portrait latch-hook rugs, documentary videos, a two-channel video installation, large scale prints and preparatory studies, sheer felted tulle and alpaca ball gowns displayed on clear plastic torsos made from my own form, and a live performance of Alice Cooper’s seminole 1971 album “Love It To Death”. This project has been my life for six years, through tragedy, mental illness, major weight gain from medications, and injury
Each “Bareskin Rug” (the central pieces to the project) is hooked by hand, soley by the artist, on a backing of monk’s cloth that contains 13 holes per linear inch. These rugs are made from hand-painted lace-weight alpaca yarn in flesh tones, cream and black. One rug takes approximately eight months to complete. The first rug, “Bareskin Rug One (study)” (2005-2007) was displayed at Linfield College in 2007 and was stolen from the gallery floor on October 8th of that year. Some months later it was “discovered” in a dumpster, wet and smelly, and returned. The day the rug was found, I was planning to debut a new song at karaoke, “Everybody Wants You” by Billy Squier, which seemed like serendipity. This performance later became a two-channel video installation featuring a home-made backing karaoke video that has the news footage from the theft and subsequent return of the piece.
This body of work explores the obsessive and futile concentration on daily maintenance activities that reiterate predominant myths of female beauty. The obsessive and ritualistic nature of re-creating one’s physical self, inch by inch, in the form of a hand hooked rug examines and questions the way we as women make ourselves up in this world of physicality. As a woman and an artist, I am interested in an image created over time. I ruminate on the way I present myself by repeatedly “putting on my face”, exercising (or not exercising), and the always difficult battle of choosing the right clothes to cover my flaws. This daily re-creation of the self, in art and in life, has psychological and physical endurance implications as well.
Placement of these self-portraits on the floor, to be stepped on (but not really….PLEASE), is strategic. There is an element of narcissism to self-portraiture in general, especially with the nude. It is my intent to both participate in and objectify narcissism as a concept. We all have elements of self-love, narcissism and self-loathing in our psychic fabrics; I have taken it many steps further by recording mine in physical objects, in affect trying to reconcile the physical with the psychological.
Failure, a key concept to all of my work, enters into this project on many levels. The rugs fail to function as ordinary rugs, though they beg to be tread upon. Video documentation of the artist “hooking” and singing a different album for each rug fails to live up to traditional music videos in production, sound quality and vocal prowess. A full collection of empty pill bottles from the time of my diagnosis to present shows the ultimate sign of trial and error, as well as a general failure to function. The alpaca ball gowns reveal instead of conceal. With the rugs and the ball gowns, flaws in the body are stylized but not obscured.
There is nowhere to hide.