Alexis Armes 

     As a little girl growing up in the Midwest, I looked up to the bombshell image women that were constantly shown to me through television, magazines, advertisements, and social media. I yearned to be them. To be seductive. To live the sex kitten fantasy that I was surrounded by. It shaped my thought process, my self-perception, and my confidence...greatly affecting the way I carried myself through formative teenage years into adulthood.

     Within my mixed media, photo-driven, and (at times) surrealist sculptures, I explore the real-life consequences of the virality of these types of hypersexual personas in the media and how it connects to the history of the everyday woman’s place in society. I also analyze the economical place of women and how it affects society’s perception of them by using ceramic photo transfers of historical imagery of sex work, which is often considered “the world’s oldest profession”. At times, I pair this imagery of 17-1800s sex workers alongside modern-day sex symbols popular in the media today. The similarities in corseted silhouettes between women nearly 175 years apart directly confronts and visually demonstrates the dysphoria women’s bodies have steadily been in for centuries.

     As my perspective widened with age, I began to see through the characters and fantasies, I saw the real-life everyday women underneath the tunneled calculated personas. I listened to women like Rita Hayworth state, “I never really thought of myself as a sex goddess”, which opposed the media’s dialogue on her lifelong career as a Hollywood pin-up actress. In my work, I use reoccurring symbols to highlight the conflicting nature of being a woman living a life based in the male gaze, in which so many must. Some of these symbols include bananas, U.S. pennies, bedroom fabrics like satin and lace, and the color red which references sexuality and the still prevalent practice of a red-light district.

     The research and process of creating my work have allowed me to deconstruct the societal narrative that a woman must be naturally posh, erotic, and stripped bare to be desirable. My work presents this narrative in a voyeuristic way, in which, my audience can see how man-made and manufactured the concept of an ideal woman is. It is hard for young women to decondition their minds to not present a fabricated version of themselves that adheres to a constant societal demand. I hope my work inspires everyone to celebrate that they look nothing like the person next to them, and to never live a manufactured life based off the way society drives the perception of beauty.