The Pink Room
The centerpiece of the Pink Room is a two-channel color video projection accompanied by a soundtrack of static and highly processed, slowed-down pop music that underscores a desperate darkness of adolescence performed by two girls. In the anesthetic room, they sink into a pink void through an improvised floor dance and actions on mass-produced pink objects.
The pleasure of power, and the power of pleasure, but what if there is no pleasure? The girls are fixed by a gaze they perceive to be fixed upon them; this is their supposed pleasure.
The visual culture that surrounds teenage girls poses the location of pleasure as being that which is consumed by the gaze. To be looked at, particularly to look good enough to be looked at, is pleasure.
The process was a space of play and stillness, seeking out pleasure in simply being but also assured by the collaborative and safe environment we established. However, once projected the scene is subject to voyeurism, the gaze needed to be reclaimed. So, the exhibition was monitored by a teen girl who stared down anyone who entered the gallery. She assured that the space remained in their control with the steely gaze of a popular girl at the head of the lunch table commanding all in her path.
The fantasy of femininity is perpetuated by our culture's development of codes for performing the feminine, visualized daily through mass produced objects in a mass produced color palette… Pink. This highly designed cultural unreality places girls in a state of impossible expectation removed of their own pleasure, as stated by Britney Spears at the age of sixteen: “ I don't need nobody telling me just what I wanna/ What I what what what I'm gonna/ Do about my destiny/ I Say No, No/ Nobody's telling me just what I wanna do, do/ I'm so fed up with people telling me to be/ Someone else but ME.”
Excerpts from The Pink Room
The Pink Room: three between
This project was made possible by the Russell Foundation Grant, and support from UC San Diego Visual Arts.