| The main body of my work is a number of human dolls that aim to raise questions about the numerous images of the objectified and idealized body that we see in the mass media. The doll images are composites, with the dolls’ limb-joints painstakingly, digitally, superimposed onto the human subjects to create disturbing images. Often these images exploit the poses and visual conventions of glamour photography and pornography to achieve an unsettling position that spans titillation, repulsion, and humor, the ultimate goal being to provoke thought and discussion by highlighting the element of construction in the images to which they refer. I came to make this work as a reaction to the lowest-common-denominator approach to masculinity taken by the media, which serves and perpetuates the “lad” or “raunch” elements of our culture. |  |
Alex Sandwell Kliszynski
The main body of my work is a number of human dolls that aim to raise questions about the numerous images of the objectified and idealized body that we see in the mass media. The doll images are composites, with the dolls’ limb-joints painstakingly, digitally, superimposed onto the human subjects to create disturbing images. Often these images exploit the poses and visual conventions of glamour photography and pornography to achieve an unsettling position that spans titillation, repulsion, and humor, the ultimate goal being to provoke thought and discussion by highlighting the element of construction in the images to which they refer.
I came to make this work as a reaction to the lowest-common-denominator approach to masculinity taken by the media, which serves and perpetuates the “lad” or “raunch” elements of our culture. Curiously this “lad/raunch” culture seems also to be embraced by many young women, a phenomenon that seems contrary to a properly progressive understanding of gender and identity in a post-feminist era. I found Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories regarding the construction of the ego and sexual difference useful both in understanding the cultural phenomenon and clarifying the approach to my work.
More recently I have begun to move away from the references to mass media, and use established styles and traditions in art and photography. This is in part because I did not want my work to be seen as a high-culture-versus-low-culture statement. There is a long history of the objectified body in art, which I see only as being in a different place on the same sliding scale as my other references, rather than in an entirely different group. Perhaps it is largely only through the associations with wealth, privilege, education, and an aestheticism that these high-culture treatments of the nude have been legitimized.
