Within youth and consumer culture, success and beauty standards are set by the rapid speed of the young, the new and/or the disposable. As each 'super-babe' or 'super-stud' moves into the pop arena, they don the all‑important accouterments of notable, radical, or current fashion. It is a full package, soon to be replaced by the next fad.
The public response to reality TV and the American Idol franchise provoked three series of works For the Camera, Your Field of Contestants, and Whatcha Really, Really Want… Have we bought into illusions of fame from the comfort of our own living room? During the spring of 2003, when Canada launched its talent search, I sought the opportunity to document the audition and TV production process in Montreal and Toronto in order to examine the expectations raised by the twenty-first century’s new heights of consumption and test the assumptions sustaining youth/pop star obsession from within its own community.
After the documentary component (titled For the Camera) of this body of work, I used my experience of immersion into audition culture to construct two staged series. Your Field of Contestants is a set of 50 poster-sized portraits of people of all ages in song posed for the camera. These portraits reveal personae fabricated for the camera and defined by media fashion. Whatcha Really, Really Want… is an installation with three components that echo the viewer participation element of the TV production. The images from Your Field of Contestants are here sized at 11” x 9” and hung as a grid display from which the gallery audience is encouraged to vote for their favourite selection. This ballot generates a ‘top ten’ contestant display that changes weekly and is reflected by a second set of photos of each contestant taken from a video monitor titled This Week’s Top Ten.
In 1997, I adopted the persona of 'Suzy Peau de Soie' as a vehicle to highlight the dilemma of the active, but ageing female in the face of these constructed yardsticks of beauty or accomplishment. I am now in my late 50’s; what can I do that Brittany Spears cannot do? The issue of ageing is not new (nor always gender specific); but what is new is the increase of a middle‑aged (female) work force that must address this problematic situation. The Suzy Spice and Suzy Peau de Soie characterizations confirmed that I could indeed 'pass' for younger, but to read the work this way overlooks the 'problem’. There is a critique implied in this façade that reveals an absurd desperation, as in The Kindness of Gentlemen, or a raw energy that reverberates beneath the surface in Forever Young. Minor works in the Suzy Spice series play with the persistent marketing of the fountain of youth as the ideal.