I AM COMPLICIT

Today my class did the installation of our "Anthropology of Art" group piece. The idea was for the whole class (40 0f us) to come up with an art idea, all together!...and bring it through from conception to completion as a group. The aim was to create not an art object, but art that had a message to tell and an idea to convey.

We came up the the idea of complicity; how we are all complicit in our daily lives in so many ways and that we were going to recognize this complicity and take responsibility for it. We screen printed the words I AM COMPLICIT onto T-Shirts and then decided that we would photograph ourselves wearing them in certain places, therefore moving the idea into the space in which we feel we have been complicit. We then wrote our thoughts on our complicity. We installed the T-shirts and created a group blog to go with it, bringing our personal stories of complicity into the light. The blog pretty much explains the whole project much better than I did.

Here's my story of complicity;

As a young woman, I feel that we are continuously bombarded with unrealistic ideals of beauty, ideals to which most of us will never live up. The beauty industry promotes a very narrow view of what beauty is; white, skinny, tall, perfect women. Most of the images we see have been retouched and manipulated in order to portray this unachievable perfection. We all know that most women do not fit this ideal, we are all different. A majority of us talk about acceptance of everyone regardless of appearance, I believe this too. I know that what the beauty industry portrays is a false ideal and I know that this ideal is so very damaging to the self-esteem of many young girls, myself included. I know that the goal of the industry is ultimately to sell more products and by creating this unobtainable ideal which we are lead to believe can only be reached through buying and buying more products, through changing ourselves, altering ourselves so that we fit this image we are  lead to believe that beauty equates happiness. I know how harmful, damaging and immoral the beauty industry is, I also think that people should be free to be themselves and that the immense pressure I feel as a woman constantly comparing myself with these ideals of perfection can be detrimental.Yet irregardless, I still buy into this ideal, I feel the pressure to conform to this ideal, I am a consumer of it all even though I think it is wrong, in this way I AM COMPLICIT

Anyway, go read! and hopefully it will give people something to think about and maybe question their own complicity and perhaps even make people want to make changes?