This series began with a fascination for the gaze of mannequins and the uneasy question of what differentiates their presence in photographs from that of a living subject. Storefront mannequins, particularly those staged in luxury boutiques, embody an idealized physique and a codified fashion image. Their faces, though fixed and inanimate, bear a haunting resonance—eerily echoing the expressions I often observed within Miami’s nightlife and high society.
The intrigue deepened when I received a mannequin catalog in the mail, meticulously classifying bodies into categories of style, posture, and desirability. The taxonomy of these artificial figures revealed how commerce reduces the complexity of human form and identity to legible, consumable types.
This body of work engages with traditions that interrogate the gaze, objectification, and the artificial body—from Hans Bellmer’s unsettling doll constructions to Cindy Sherman’s staged self-portraits, and from Claude Cahun’s destabilization of gender to Laurie Simmons’ tableaux of dolls and mannequins. Like these artists, I use the inanimate figure as a proxy through which to explore desire, repression, and the cultural machinery that produces “ideal” bodies.
The mannequins operate here as both mirror and mask. They reflect a society that venerates surfaces, classifies beauty, and eroticizes the domestic, while also providing a space where memory and fantasy can be externalized and examined. In their silence, they speak to the complexities of looking: how we see others, how we are seen, and how the act of looking itself is entangled with desire, power, and loss.