PLASTICS
Blow up dolls: they’re sold all over the world in sex shops and catalogues. Who buys them? Nobody ever admits to buying one, let alone using one, but still they are produced in vast quantities, in sweatshops of developing nations, producing byproducts of pollution as they manufacture the desire byproducts of shame. Constructed to represent fetishized image of pornography, which in turn are commodified representation of a media idea, which in turn are produced as idols to a hungry culture fed on individuals’ insecurity, fears and inadequacies.
The dolls and parts are interchangeable, like the notion of beauty standards, so why not take them to the next step and click them together like an IKEA furniture?
If these objects, artifacts of post-industrial desire make you uncomfortable, why?
If they make you laugh, why?
Midori’s art gives exhibition goers the chance to be up close and personal with these objects of derision. Her art is approachable and interactive; people are encouraged to play with it and in doing so find the humor and pathos of a plastic woman.
It is designed to instigate conversation, laughter, emotional disquiet and reflection on mass production, shame, sexual and gender performance.
This body of work began with The LoveSeat.
“LoveSeat”
The LoveSeat was a response to the deep grief and anger that I felt in the pit of my stomach while serving as a Arts Selection Juror at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival in 2007. Of the hundreds of artwork submitted, so many were terrible photos of rope bondage on misogynistically stereotypical young women clad in unimaginative garments, placed in banal sexist composition. The photo takers seemed more enamoured with the technicality of their digital equipment and macrame skills. The women themselves seemed disposable or interchangeable.
This led me to create a sofa that matched the art.
It’s made of dozens of cheap prefabricated female form blowup dolls, rope bound together over a framework. It is fully usable as a sofa for two people. It is designed to instigate conversation, laughter, emotional disquiet and reflection on mass production, shame, sexual and gender performance.
[Medium: Blow up dolls, rope, wood, plastic, metal]
From the LoveSeat followed a group of sculptures made from repurposed novelty sex toys and cheap masturbation devices. Most of the pieces are interactive and instigate social discourse.
“If You Listen Carefully”
Large seashlls with silicone vulva forms. One of the shells has an ear bud embedded in it, from which a soundtrack composed by the artist plays a mix of sounds representing euphemistic substitutions of female genitals (waves, cats meowing, water dripping, gushing waves, etc.).
[Medium: Sea shells, silicone masturbation sleeves, glue, electronics, custom sound track]
“Hello Beautiful”
Go ahead, take a seat. Try them on. Aren’t you pretty! Why don’t you take some cam pics of your beautiful new self?
A stripped down boudoir created with a stool, a mirror and multiple sex doll heads cut to allow them to be used for masks. Comprising a mix of fetishized “ethnic” representations and genders, this piece allows the viewer to become a doll for a while, to experience being plastic, to be an object of desire and scorn. Perhaps one of these maybe “types” that you’ve fetishized. As you wear their skin, how do you feel? When you take it off, what do you take with you? What do you leave behind?
[Medium: severed blow-up doll heads, table, mirror, stool, string]
“Comfort station”
A pair of silicone/plastic breasts, usually used by men for feminization or masturbation, now bound tightly with wire, forms a pair of headsets. As the breast surrounds the listener they hear the sound of money being counted.
[Medium: silicone breast forms, headset, mp3 player]
“Lovely”
A blow-up doll on a medical gurney. Suspended above her is a door. Hanging from the door by thin red yarn, are over 600 sharp objects. They hang close to her vinyl flesh but not touching it. Some are cutting objects of domesticity, others are surgical tools used to create perfection. Knitting needles, cooking knives, scalpels, hypodermic needles, sewing needles, power tool blades, scissors, razor blades… All are sharp things that a woman may come in contact with in her life.
[Medium: Blow-up doll, gurney, assorted sharp objects, yarn, wood frame, fishing line]