A young woman, face slack with sexual ecstasy, rides a decrepit rocking horse; the horse’s head and mane positioned suggestively between her thighs. A popular teen starlet poses with her thumb planted firmly in her mouth, all the while gazing expectantly at the viewer. An undeniably beautiful woman touches her lips to the tip of her phallic pacifier—a perfume bottle emblazoned with the word “love.” The plaid tie of a schoolgirl uniform serves as a gag, silencing a woman whose livid stare indicates she would protest, were her mouth not stuffed with cloth. My body of work is driven by my obsessive hunt to elucidate the ways in which societal tastes shape both our sexual predators and their ill-fated prey. My paintings are scathing re-presentations of the cultural fetishes marketed to the most impressionable among us. These are my interpretations— both sinister and humorous —of the eroticized chimeras to which some look for inspiration, and others look for titillation.

I am fascinated by the ways in which popular images both reflect and shape the sexual perceptions of a culture. My work spotlights the contemporary exploitation of eroticized innocence as a marketing tool. Within media sources as varied as Vogue and Disney, women masquerade as young girls— powerless and infantilized —while pre-pubescent girls are portrayed as sexually precocious yet vulnerable. Though the sexual exploitation of children is an unequivocal taboo, a survey of the media suggests it is a pervasive fantasy.

Though my current artistic spotlight remains trained upon eroticized innocence as a marketing tool, I have recently begun a series of paintings that take their narrative cues from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Lolita has been described as a “cunning expose of chronic American adolescence and shabby materialism;” with that in mind, I can think of no better literary springboard from which to paint. While reading Lolita, I became fascinated by Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades— particularly the ready-made’s status as a pedestrian object, robbed of its original intent and re-presented to the viewer. A ready-made is a visual deconstruction; its meanings left mutable depending upon the context into which it is placed.

Nabokov’s Humbert describes Lolita as, “she it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” Lolita can be seen as a sort of ready-made herself: a young girl robbed of her innocence—her context—by a man who wishes to re-present her as a prurient construct of his own desires. Lolita is a child re-presented as a nymphet. Within my new series, I re-contextualize the nymphets that populate mass media fantasies, inserting them into my interpretations of Humbert’s muddled and melancholic narrative. Not unlike the eroticized young girls extant in advertisements, Lolita exists in Humbert’s mind as nothing more than a receptacle for desires--both his erotic desires and her materialistic desires.