this is not a role model

(those are mirrors over the eyes #scannerprobz)

this one says "stop focusing on your flaws" it's kind of hard to read because my scanner just doesn't understand

i  made these for an art show that was in shreveport last week (omen art xoxoxox). my REALLY INCREDIBLE WORKS OF ART are women's magazine covers altered to have a positive message. i left the titles because they're so widely recognized and attention-getting, and i designed them to look like a middle school or high school girl could have made them with glitter, collages, doodling, etc. 

middle school- and high school-age was the time in my life when these types of magazines had their greatest impact. i got my first ~*girly magazine*~ when i was only in fifth grade. it was a YM magazine (no longer existz) with a guy on the cover that i didn't know because i was still blissfully innocent and the internet barely existed and celebrity gossip wasn't being shoved down my pure 10-year-old throat. i only even got the magazine as a prop for a skit that a classmate and me were doing during friday mass. (please feel free to silently criticize my parents for carelessly putting their easily-influenced adolescent daughter in a catholic middle school in the first place :o(((((() 

ANYWAY my point is that for seven to twelve years of my life, i did more than read those magazines, i studied and analyzed them and took every bit of information as truth. i kept all of them until my mom was like you absolutely have to get rid of at least some of these your most prized collection of every teen people/teen vogue/cosmogirl ever THIS IS A FIRE HAZARD, after which i just tore out pictures of girls that i thought were pretty and wanted to look like and kept in a special folder which i'm pretty sure i still have hidden somewhere. probably the most detrimental thing those magazines taught me was that i had to be tan in the summer and also have perfect eyebrows and also BE PERFECT IN EVERY WAY AND HERE IS HOW. but enough about my deeply-rooted insecurities.

(what's really important is that i can still tell you that leonardo dicaprio was on the may 1997 issue of seventeen.)

i'm embarrassed to admit that it wasn't until a few years ago that i truly understood the message they were sending. oh, you're saying we need makeovers? THIS CELEBRITY IS SOOooOoOo DOWN-TO-EARTH. here is a fashion-do which you should definitely wear but here is a fashion-don't WHAT WAS THAT PERSON WHO ACTUALLY HAS THEIR OWN SENSE OF STYLE THINKING? believe me i've done my fair share of scanning the barnes and noble shelves and what i see lately are even worse than the teen ones i read when i was younger, and now that i'm a bit older i'm noticing the attack on physical signs of aging (see magazine #1) in the form of cosmetic ads. "H8 UR WRINKLES, THEY R UGLY". hollywood and society in general are so fucked up, y'all. 

basically what i'm trying to say is that when i was trying to come up with a topic for the women's self-esteem/body-image themed art show, magazines seemed like sort of an obvious medium. they're so destructive to the minds of girls and women and it struck a personal chord, obvi. hope y'all like them n think they r kewl.

in related news i've decided i'm doing my part to rebel against society's standards of beauty by not wearing a dark-colored bathing suit bottom to balance out my figure and what are YOU GUYS doing? cya xox