Beauty Queen Totem 

The work that thematically anchors the artist’s 2009 exhibition Power and Burden of Beauty is the monumental Beauty Queen Totem, which stands some eleven feet tall on a victory platform that is archly suggestive of a wedding cake. Crowned, gowned and sashed on her trophy, this beauty contest winner is immediately recognizable, looking at once perfect and perfectly wrong. With her ramrod posture and a stony blankness in her anonymous gaze, she appears to be stranded in victory. Rather than a bejeweled tiara, she wears a blank headpiece formed around a single narcissus bloom, a touchstone for the impermanence of beauty and the inevitability of decay.