Poison Candy Flowers

Inspired by Allen Ginsberg and "Howl," I started flipping through my journal. I found some scribblings on Cindy Sherman- a contemporary artist and photographer. Sherman is interested in all things simulacral: copies with no original, mass memory, disappearance of the artist/ person behind the mask of stereotype. Sherman is a feminist-I know you're envisioning hairy armpits and Birkenstocks but bare with me. She's interested in the Real World pressure for girls to conform to filmic stereotypes--> fake eyelashes and big breasts and simulated conversation. Sherman examines woman as "spectacle" and "symptom," and as the passive object of male attention. In some ways, to paraphrase her photography and artistic philosophy, characters are constantly constructed in film but also in life through costume, clothing, and manicured nails. Sherman's photography is eerie, and whimsical, and often familiar. She fools you, harkening to previous artistic products though never directly referencing anything. She creates false memories. I'm fascinated by her and by artifice in general. I always have trouble putting together outfits or buying clothes because with any purchase, a commitment is made to a genre or style or icon that I don't necessarily align with. Of course, a shirt is just a shirt...except when it's not. I'm hung up on fantasies. After all, in another life I was matador, leopard with gold bell, Botticelli beauty, burnt toast, gold necklace, Napoleon and Richard Nixon. The point is that when we reapply mascara or cut our toenails, we're secretly trying to tell a story. We're trying to make our own legend and fiction. It's exciting and exhausting...but of course, womanhood is both of those in equal measure.