Artworks

BEAUTY QUEEN TOTEM

The work that thematically anchors the artist’s 2009 exhibition Power and Burden of Beauty is the monumental Beauty Queen Totem, which stands some eleven feet tall on a victory platform that is archly suggestive of a wedding cake. Crowned, gowned and sashed on her trophy, this beauty contest winner is immediately recognizable, looking at once perfect and perfectly wrong. With her ramrod posture and a stony blankness in her anonymous gaze, she appears to be stranded in victory. Rather than a bejeweled tiara, she wears a blank headpiece formed around a single narcissus bloom, a touchstone for the impermanence of beauty and the inevitability of decay.

Beauty Queen Totem (Marble), 2009