The 100 Day Project #20
Invisible City - Perfection is an Illness
Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2008
The 100 Day Project, Day 20
The beauty and wellness industries didn't invent the idea that women should make themselves manageable. They just found a way to sell it back to us. Most of us had already learned the lesson long before — in the way we were praised for being agreeable, corrected for being too much, and quietly taught that taking up space was something that had to be earned.
I made my photo, Perfection is an Illness, by overlaying the reflection of a neon sign onto a mannequin's head. The image almost made itself. Because that's what the pressure to conform does — it overlays something artificial onto something real, until you can barely tell where one ends and the other begins.
Like many women I know, I spent decades morphing into what others needed me to be. Smaller. Quieter. More palatable. I didn't vanish — I was slowly, quietly building the nerve to take up space. Doing the work of unlearning the survival systems I'd had to craft to be accepted — because many relationships that had conditioned me had also made one thing clear: make yourself manageable, or risk being left.
It's been years of undoing. Of unlearning. Of ceasing to make myself less for other people's comfort. I'm not for everyone. I never was. But the people who see me clearly, who sense my intent, who tell me lovingly when I'm wrong — those are my people. My love runs deep for them. And also for myself.
This photograph was made during The Invisible City, a five-week, site-specific experimental arts lab in downtown Tucson — a collaboration between NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre and Kore Press. More from this project throughout this week.
About the 100 Day Project: A global creative challenge where thousands of artists share a piece of their practice every single day for 100 days. Each day I'll be sharing one of my photos — some recent, some old, and some from my current project — along with the story behind it: where I was, who I was with, and why I love it.