'Spoon Fed', 2006
38.1 x 38.1
'The Way to a Mans Heart,' 2006
screen print, 38.1 x 38.1
After feminism, Peyton Place, Tom Learer, David Lynch, Gregory Crewdson and the directors of 'Desperate Housewives' unearthed the sinister activity, hypocrisy and seedy sexual subtext hidden behind clichés of saccharine, sanitized suburbia, it is hard to look at a beaming housewife and her spotless kitchen without expecting the worst. Bangkok-born, Philadelphia-based Laura C Wagner's sarcastic series of screen prints, 'The Cannibal Debutante', drives another spike into the myth of suburbian perfection. In Wagner's appropriations of illustrations from a vintage cookbook, the meals wasp-waisted mothers teach their identically dressed daughters to prepare all contain human remains. Even a little girl feeding her dolly is training the toy to eat the mangled parts of another toy. For these women and girls, the raw meat of human experience and fleshy sensation has been boiled and baked until becoming utterly bland. Biting through the banality, Wagner's sharp, smart imagery reveals the complex humanity buried behind plastic-fantastic images of perfection.
To see more of Laura C Wagner's work visit her Your Gallery profile page by clicking here.
Ana Finel Honigman
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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