Beauty and Bling

Beauty and Bling 2009

Digital Photography Series

Self Portraits and Still Lives

 ‘Beauty and Bling’  

The Barbie Doll Sets are photographs of various ‘Ethnic’ Barbie Dolls adapting or attempting to adapt to ‘Barbie Dolls’ Caucasian Eurocentric ‘world’. I also include photographs of Barbie Doll critiquing herself in her world. The Barbie Doll Sets are staged scenes where I create parodies and satires that critique stereotypical Barbie Doll beauty and Caucasian, European standards of beauty.

The Grillz Self Portraits are personas that rebel yet slightly conform with popular culture’s stereotypical beauty ideals. The Self Portrait’s personas loosely emulate the various Barbie Dolls’ ethnicities represented in the Barbie doll Set photographs. The Grillz Self Portraits confront beauty ideals, gender boundaries, various identities and social constructions of race.

Grillz represent pride in many cultures and in Hip-Hop culture; they represent the “flash of spirit”, (Flash of the Spirit : African & Afro-American Art and Philosophy by Robert Farris Thompson) self worth, and rebellion. Typically Grillz are worn by men who are often emphasizing their ‘machismo’. A woman wearing Grillz flips the gender construction associated with Grillz from masculine to feminine. Now the woman wearing  the Grillz flashes Her spirit, Her pride, Her self worth, and Her bling.

Both Grillz Self Portraits and Barbie Doll Sets critique notions of plasticity, beauty, identity, and race.

***Joan Morgan talks about hip-hop, gender and race in her book ‘When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost : A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down’.

Morgan states on page 80, “ I believe hip-hop can help us win. Let’s start by recognizing that its illuminating, informative narration and its incredible ability to articulate our collective pain is an invaluable tool when examining gender relations. The information we amass can help create a redemptive, healing space for brothas and sistas.

We’re all winners when a space exists for brothers to honestly state and explore the roots of their pain and subsequently their misogyny, sans judgement. It is criminal that the only space our society provided for the late Tupac Shakur to examine the pain, confusion, drug addiction, and fear that led to his arrest and his eventual assassination was in a prison cell. How can we win if a prison cell is the only space an immensely talented but troubled young black man could dare utter these words: “Even though I’m not guilty of the charges they gave me, I’m not innocent in terms of the way I was acting. I’m as guilty for not doing things. Not with this case but with my life. I had a job to do and I never showed up. I was so scared of this responsibility that I was running away from it.” We have to do better than this for our men. And we have to do better for ourselves. We desperately need a space to lovingly address the uncomfortable issues of our failing self-esteem, the ways we sexualize and objectify ourselves, our confusion about sex and love and the unhealthy, unloving, unsisterly ways we treat each other. Commitment to developing theses spaces gives our community the potential for remedies based on honest, clear diagnoses.”