While on a recent trip to Spain I came across a collection of erotic porcelain dolls. These pink-toned, hairless, smooth, nipple-free objects reclined in strangely knowing docility, their soft features nearly lost among jumbled shelves of fin-de-siecle bric-a-brac.
I began to consider their role and purpose. They radiate coded messages of class, gender, and sex; of ethnocentrisms, religious taboos and colonial projects; of dominance, obsession, and commodification. These dolls, and the multiple gazes they invoke, invite so many questions. How is the sexualized gaze oriented, trained, and gratified by such objects, both in their original colonial setting and in today’s Barbified global consumer empires?
I began to desire them (but not perhaps in the intended way). Were they relics of lust, envy, greed? Perhaps sloth; perhaps even anger. I wanted to play with them. So I did.
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| Queen of Heaven, 2017 |
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| Limbo, 2017 |
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| Ecstasis, 2017 |
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| Perla, 2017 |
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| Rapture, 2017 |
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| Evangel, 2017 |
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| Passion, 2017 |
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Luxuria, 2017
Digital painting, mounted on aluminum and plexiglass.
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