LAURA POWELL

 

Pain is beauty and beauty is pain. It’s something girls are told the moment they’re asked to put on their first pair of tights and tie a bow in their hair.  It’s a reminder that stilettos and hair extensions are just a byproduct of being a woman. In the same world, young boys are bullied daily for not being enough – handsome enough, strong enough, good enough.  Their muscles should be toned and buff and their sexual stamina should be unceasing, or they aren’t considered a “man”. 

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Beauty is pain, and thus surgically altering and painting our bodies is justified, so we can compete in a world that measures us by our external appearance. Focusing on the corporal and cerebral modifications that people go through in pursuit of idealized standards, I examine the gruesome side of the feelings of inadequacy experienced daily. The subjects’ open flesh and bones symbolize the actual and psychological wounds endured to fit the mold.

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The contemporary gothic aesthetic currently driving my practice, focuses on death, abnormality, the erotic macabre, psychologically charged positions, or fragmented bodies. Motifs such as life and death, or hideousness and beauty, are brought together in an attempt to produce terrifying consequences that will provoke intrigue.