Frankenlovely: Our Obsession With Image & Youth Illustrated

It is no surprise that we live in an image and youth obsessed culture. Most of the women I know are either obsessed with having the perfect face, the perfect body or even just the perfect hair. My question is, what is perfect anyway and why do we scratch and claw our way through so many headaches to achieve that status?

Perhaps it’s because we think it will make our man love us more, or maybe it’s just to feel worthy within ourselves. I’m not sure, but I’ve even been sucked into this mentality before myself, and I know better. I’m not overweight, yet I continue to obsess about every single calorie that goes in my mouth. It’s ridiculous really. I touched on this before in an article called The Relationship Between Women and Food Illustrated. Lee Gainer, an artist living in the Washington DC area, obviously asks herself these same questions. According to her official website, she likes to create art that “visually analyzes unwritten rules, hidden messages, the psychology behind these ideas and beliefs, and how they alter our behavior.”

In this series of prints called Frankenlovely, she pokes a little fun at how serious women sometimes take life and their appearance. After all, is beauty just a sum of all our parts? She took fashion magazine pictures and cut out what is considered to be a set of perfect lips, perfect eyes, perfect nose, etc… and put them together to make new faces, “perfect faces.” She then added her own artistic style to complete the look. These are called photo collages, and to be quite honest, although I can appreciate the message, it’s a little creepy to me! These Frankenlovely images seem a little Frankenstein to me, but maybe that’s the point. You can check out more of Lee Gainer’s work here.

[via Design Boom]