“What If?” was my thesis project at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. It is self-portraiture that explores my childhood obsessions with specific celebrities like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, Youtube personalities like Tana Mongeau and Trisha Paytas, and icons like Jennifer Coolidge and Pamela Anderson. They were role models of sorts in terms of their agency and sex appeal, which both seemed to be qualities that were tightly linked.
Like many young women, I was modeling my gender presentation in conversation with these images, and more specifically, began imagining myself as them. My childhood was filled with hours and hours of daydreams each day in which I imagined myself to be like these women, living their lives. Perhaps if I looked like them I would find myself leading a completely different life and I would be able to escape the dullness of high school and beyond.
In this work I taught myself to use prosthetics and makeup to evoke a completely different character than my own, inspired by the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing, Nadia Lee Cohen, Marilyn Minter, and Daniela Rossell. I hoped to not simply critique celebrity culture and my obsessions with glamour and beauty, but to imagine a more complicated relationship that includes both critique and also play. I believe that there is an oddness around the femme experience and our interactions with the media, but there is also pleasure in looking and imagining. In this way the characters look both flawed and distorted, but gaze at us full of confidence, refusing to be dismissed as abject.