Lisa Weisdorf - When You Lose Your Glow

When You Lose Your Glow is an ongoing project examining issues of gender, beauty, the female body, and the disciplining of feminine excess. The series is currently comprised of molds and casts of wrinkle prevention pillows. My interest in these commodities lies in the way in which they leech off of the anxieties surrounding ageing – and the attendant decline in socio-sexual desirability – that arise for women within the framework of a patriarchal society. They promise immunization against the effects of gravity (i.e., wrinkles, understood as abject corporeal markers of an increasing proximity to death), and disavow their participation in the project of alienating women from their own bodies by invoking (pseudo-)scientific authority to lay claim to broad health benefits. The additional self-maintenance labor and bodily constriction they impose upon women is re-packaged as self-care. I experiment with non-traditional and organic materials in order to lay bare the absurdities and ambivalences of these products, and I work to understand what their existence might tell us about contemporary paradigms of beauty and femininity.