Anna Campbell

Anna Campbell

 

Artist Statement

/sash (2013) is a layered latex and heavily ruffled sash, draped over a series of six scale model sawhorses – tools used to support the construction, in this case, of an idealized form. The sash references any number of Miss America, teen or tiaraed toddler pageants, as much as the signifier for the suffragettes of a century ago, and the pageantry of the gay male competitive fetish scene. The excess in the forms’ construction renders a kind of vulgar adornment, no less vulgar for latex’s ready read as both skin and eroticized substitute for skin. That the excess would also be hyper-feminine, in pinks and reds, in ruffled texture, in clitoral rosette, makes the insistent visibility of /sash all the more flamboyantly vulgar. The slash of its title – the symbol of the slanted line rather than the word spelled out- operates as a reminder of the liminal space where the agents that comprise a hybrid form meet, as a reminder of the directional line drawn across the body of someone who might mark themselves as an agent to secure a right that has been denied, or identify the wearer as superlative in some performance of personal aesthetics, and as a reminder of the potential for violence at that site, a potential also articulated by the fact of the works’ position, low to the ground and composed from parts that reference not only construction site, but also litter and stretcher.