Play is an attempt to explore the canonization and historical progression of female beauty presented in the pages of Playboy magazine. In Play, the flickering faces of every Playboy Magazine centerfold from the publication's first 50 years (1953 to 2004) meld together, collapsing time and emerging with a collective portrait. Temporal shifts in photographic representation blend together and speak to the crafted relationship between gaze, desire, and sex object. The piece takes each Playmate of the Month ("POTM") from the and, cropping out nothing but the model's face, plays them in sequence at twelve frames per second (i.e. fifty years in fifty seconds). By centering their eyes and showing only the models' faces, my aim is to refocus and reflect the gaze back to the viewer, presenting a non-stop sequence of faces staring outward from the frame. Your persistence of vision fuses the images into a gestalt impression of Playboy's (and, as a result, much of America's) ideal of feminized beauty as it has changed over the last fifty years.

artwork at bitforms