© Suellen Parker 2008 | Powered by PortfolioAtlas MT
It’s been years since I’ve allowed myself to buy any magazine that presents me with the hollow hope of getting those “Perfect Abs!” or a “Bikini-Ready Beach Body.” Still, this doesn’t stop me from drooling over the immaculately sculpted buns and thighs that keep me company as I wait my turn in the checkout-line. Despite these obvious displays of breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, and liposuction, I find myself fascinated by these contemporary versions of Frankenstein’s Monster—supposedly perfect beings, (man-)made from a composite of desirable parts. While I might refuse the idea of a cookie-cutter mould, I am continually sucked into this media-driven vortex of socialites, movie stars, and Photoshopped models. Although my intellect preaches the fallacy of perfection, reason falls prey to desire and I find myself wondering: if granted three wishes from a good-natured genie, would I reserve one for a pair of gams that would make a supermodel jealous? What can I say—I am human.
It is this aspect of human nature that underlies New York-based artist Suellen Parker’s photographic series Incurable. Parker’s uncanny characters embody the dizzying ideals we have come to internalize through the influences of family, friends, and popular culture, all of which have transformed physiognomy into a cultural pastime. Incurable animates the Western preoccupation with perfection coupled with inexorable measures to achieve the unattainable. The series personifies this struggle, offering humourous and candid views on the vanity inherent in our natures. In Life Preserver (2004), for example, pride borders on arrogance, as Parker’s bikini-clad “golden (years) girl” becomes a tableau of inner thought. A photograph of a photo-in-process, the character poses like a former Bay Watch beauty in front of a pinned-up beach scene that’s as authentic as her way-too-perky breasts. Crop the box spring that’s propped up against the wall, and other incongruent elements and the image just might pass itself off as a snapshot of the real thing. Here, the real and the fake oscillate continuously—as much between the photograph’s composite elements as between the pictorial and physical reality.
In Incurable, media and meaning convene to portray the human struggle resulting from a physical reality that belies an internalized ideal. Parker’s artistic process combines direct contact with tangible material and abstract interactions with digital technology. She begins by sculpting figures from plasteline clay, an oil-based clay that never dries and therefore mimics the organic nature of the human body as a continually changing, altered, and reshaped form. While Parker’s process is primarily an intuitive one, at times these sculptures are inspired by previously photographed individuals that Parker might reference as she creates human physical attributes from a malleable mass of plasteline. The sculpture is then photographed within a framework of props and lighting that provide the basis from which a persona—not simply a figure—will emerge. With the precision and skill of a plastic surgeon the artist transforms the photographed sculpture in Photoshop by “painting” the figures with various palettes while collaging elements from the photographed subjects—borrowing a pair of eyes from one person and a mouth from another, for example. Russet complexions match russet wardrobes until Parker offsets the two with digital strokes of colour and shading. The raw, imperfect plasteline exterior becomes a character like any other, instilled with hopes, desires, and delusions.
With more than a touch of irony, the series contains such works as Well Done (2006), which depicts a middle-age woman sunbathing on a cement terrace. Lying amidst her makeshift Eden, her sunburned skin resembles the lumpiness of cottage cheese and the shellacked crispiness of a rotisserie chicken. Parker’s exaggeration of the body’s imperfections is incongruent with her subject’s confident gaze and self-satisfied smile. From an era that favoured baby oil over SPF 30, Well Done conjures up before-and-after images of a movie star from the 1950s still striving to achieve the sun-kissed glow of youth.
As a series, Incurable enters into the human psyche, allowing the viewer (or voyeur) a glimpse into human foibles—inner most aspirations and disappointments personified through technological innovation. These malleable figures embody the mainstream values that are reinforced and reflected in film, television, magazines, and on the internet. An exception to this media-endorsed norm occurred when the Dove soap corporation launched its Campaign for Real Beauty with evolution, a short film depicting an indoctrinated standard of beauty that simultaneously dominates and contradicts reality. After hours of primping by a team of make-up artists and stylists, a female model (who arrives on set with bed-head and a pasty complexion) is photographed, Photoshopped, and monumentalized as a goddess in billboard format, literally elevating a standard of beauty—or—perfection, that few women (if any) could ever achieve. The film concludes with the caption: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” The making of the cover-model photograph parallels Parker’s artistic process, yet the objectives and the results exist as inverted relationships. Technology has intervened on both accounts to give the human body unnatural characteristics: the human being becomes unnaturally flawless and the unnaturally imperfect synthetic figure achieves the look of being human. These seemingly incompatible paradigms function concomitantly, with a strobe light intensity that almost evades the inherent polarity by feeding off and into one another. Desire drives this cycle of unreal standards followed by unreal expectations.
These aspirations are explored further in Parker’s photograph Great Expectations (2004), where an androgynous character waits in anticipation for a life-altering salon experience. Freshly shampooed and primed for the event, this character’s mesmerized gaze is focused on an image that feeds the internalized expectation of achieving a “new you”. Hope is intoxicating; there is always the possibility of renewing oneself with only a bit of tweaking. Here, desire is apparent, almost tangible. The figure’s expectant stare is the focal point of the work and offers the only glimpse of organicity, of a living being, in this otherwise static, grey setting. While this “new you” is essentially fleeting, I understand its allure and am no stranger to the salon-inspired renaissance. Whatever ails us inside can be quickly abated with a makeover. And, like an addict jonesing for the next fix, when the effect wears off, elation is but a salon, spa, or boutique away.
In many of Parker’s photographs, she underscores our cultural preoccupation with image through humourous contradiction. Uplifiting Smoke (2006) personifies the paradox of the health and beauty industry. Sitting on the front steps of a house, cigarette in hand, a middle-age woman admires her reflection in the metal surface of an ashtray. Obscured by a drifting cloud of cigarette smoke, the sign at the entrance of the building reads “Wellness Center.” Clearly satisfied with the results attained during her visit, the figure personifies the social value that reminds the viewer, that it is what’s on the outside that matters.
A similar irony is explored in Glamour Shot, where, like the character in Uplifiting Smoke, Parker has manifested the vicious circle between hope and longing, delusion and discontent out of clay and digital technology, Glamour Shot (2004) explores the ultimate contemporary quick fix: botox. Vanity—an affliction of the human condition that is often stereotypically perceived as gender-specific—is unabashedly visible in contemporary trends, now with the term “metrosexual” and the pervasiveness of skin-care lines, estheticians, dermatologists, and spas that cater to male aesthetic needs. In Glamour Shot, there is no differentiation between the hope, pleasure, and contentedness embodied in the male character receiving the botox treatment and Parker’s female creations. An otherwise unrealistic figure, resembling something closer to chewing gum than flesh and bone, it nonetheless, comes across as uncannily human.
Like the Dove model whose blotches and bumps have been Photoshopped to the point of being uncannily perfect, Parker’s lumpy “Pinocchios” are the uncanny, inverted counterparts. She has succeeded in perverting the “natural order” of things. Through the magic of Photoshop, Incurable becomes a synthesis of human intellect and plastic physicality, differentiating Parker’s photography from other artists working with similar media. Photographer Sarah Anne Johnson’s Sculpey figures inhabit a similar world of artifice and verisimilitude; however, the artist approaches this relationship more through interplay between the figures and their environments. In Incurable, Parker’s rubbery-looking subjects enter a deeper realm of the uncanny with a gaze that is all too human. Glassy-eyed and hopeful, they stare outward toward an imagined utopian future, allowing the viewer momentary access to an introspective portal. This is nowhere as apparent as in The Magic of Believing (2006). Somewhere between Mr. Rogers and a character from Saturday Night Live, Parker has managed to capture the robotic optimism of a motivational speaker. Parker’s character, a man with a frozen smile who looks more in need of a seminar on relaxation than one on positive thinking, stands in front of a sign listing the day’s agenda, which offers informative lessons such as “2PM Acting Sincere” and the clichéd phrase “When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.” The tension resulting from the emotional-cognitive battle between what is and what will be is part and parcel of the endless journey called self-improvement.
Although didactic in a bizarro kind of way, according to Parker her aim does not involve casting moralistic judgement on the “well-preserved” patrons of plastic surgeons and image-mechanics. Rather, she perceives these acts as manifestations of our human nature. As social beings we are what we are. Whether through the magic of believing or the magic of botox, the message is clear: our contentment is inherently fleeting in the never-ending struggle for a better, more perfect self. We are Incurable.