De-Sensitizer

This is my award winning piece of art, although one photograph cannot do it justice. I took an old television cabinet from the fifties, gutted all the innards and started from there. I had a styrofoam wig head that for some reason had a plastic face on it. then I took a rubber mask I had and glued it to the head, then taped it down and painted it flesh tone. This sat around the basement along with the tv cabinet for a week, looking spooky as you could still see the face under neath. I went to the Salvation Army and bought a plastic baby doll. The arms were ripped off and made to appear as if they were coming out the ears of the original head. The doll head was put on top of the other and it's torso came out where the mouth was. Red latex paint was liberally dripped at all contact points, then glossy Mod Podge was dumped over the whole thing. I mixed some plaster of paris and put it on the insides of the television, on one side using it to hold the

bottom of a plastic bank I had put a small blinking Christmas light under it, and on the other side I secured a small rubber skeleton in it. I slid the head(s) in on a small screen print I had painted over and towards the front is a pile of plastic Easter eggs painted flesh tone. The top of the pile has a broken open egg, with a small baby hatching out of it. There are blinking lights run along the top front, with the wiring being buried under the plaster.

Finally, I took another screen print and painted a background similar to the background on "Angry White Male"(see Archives), in fact, I believe it was the inspiration for the background of that painting. I cut it off the frame and stapled it to the back. It was a lot of work, but I entered it in the Urban Institute For Contemporary Arts Rerun Recycled art show and took second place in the artistic merit division.

television offers up images every day designed to desensitze us to the brutalness of the world. Often times, it offers up people for us to worship, adore, and celebrate, only to chew them up when they need a distraction from the atrocities of the government.