Choice Cuts

 

 

In Choice Cuts Francesca explores how women are portrayed by mass media by recreating a Frankensteinian version of the glamourous and attractive attitude women assume in magazines and television. Francesca’s starting point is the examination of magazines such as Seventeen, Glamour and Vogue. By selecting parts of the woman’s face and body such as the eyes, mouth, and legs, the artist reassembles them in a way that exaggerates their original aesthetic details. She focuses on women’s shining eyes, big lips, and ultra-sexy poses and she constructs a new set of images that shows the unnatural quality of the original representations.

 

In the final result the women assume grotesque poses that suggest an association between representation and violence. The women’s exaggerated smiles, giant lips, and unnatural eyes want to offer an alternative perspective about what is supposed to be culturally natural and spontaneous, revealing a dynamic of construction in what we are used to consider acceptable. Francesca’s work re-establish, in a mediated way, the original imperfection of the female features by including on the women’s faces the history of violence operated by culture.