April 2024, Drawing installation (cardboard, paper, string)

Résumé: Play With Me is a raw and immersive drawing installation exploring the construction of femininity, objectification and desire. Using comic-style drawings on found cardboard, I created a chaotic yet intimate space filled with characters, clothing, suspended apples, and interactive paper dolls. This installation draws from personal experience, growing up playing with dolls, and engaging with femininity as performance to critique how media, brands, and culture market femininity to young girls under the guise of empowerment.

Themes: It’s about objectification, kink, violence, media portrayals of women, feminism, girlhood, the patriarchy, physical consumption and guilt, media violence, gender expression, abjection, politics of the gaze and desire.

Effect: The piece engages viewers playfully and uncomfortably. It invites them to “play,” yet simultaneously implicates them in a disturbing system of voyeurism and consumption. The installation provokes reflection on complicity, attraction, guilt, and power.

Goal: To expose how femininity is constructed, consumed, and weaponized by the very systems that claim to liberate it. Through grotesque humor and exaggerated imagery, the installation blurs empowerment and exploitation, highlighting how female agency is often framed as deviant. Apples symbolize temptation and the female figures are depicted as criminals.

Installation Details: Costumed dolls and clothes lines evoke sexualized fashion and voyeurism. Interactive paper dolls link childhood play to performative femininity out of means of survival.

Notes : It served as a precursor to DICE, where these themes were explored more technologically.

Here’s a brief explanation of the different elements featured in the installation. 

The chocolate p**** stuffer is a character I created, who might be an alter ego of mine. She’s a giant woman that traps men by seducing them with apples and convincing them they want them to be covered in chocolate because it tastes better. The chocolate in this case, comes from her pussy (it’s written chocolate on her underwear), making the apple sweeter, which makes it more delicious, but it comes from a dirty and sexual place which implies that they’re getting themselves in a messy situation.

This character is vengeful and seeks to traumatize men by making them regret their desires, or at least make them understand they’re the ones that we’re hungry, and therefore it’s not the characters’ fault for feeding them. Because she exposes this reality, which is using the same rhetoric as the «she was asking for it» that men use to describe women that present themselves a certain way, which justifies their reasons for objectifying them.

I then started drawing a tank, which is meant to symbolise resilience. The tank presents female attributes, as it uses their appearance in the context of their fight. This is a metaphor for how I could interpret my body being used as a weapon, to distract men from the fact I’m trying to fight the patriarchy, using anatomy as bait.

I then started to draw more apples, being shot out of this tank, as they symbolize lust, to show how the Wanted character has a whole contingent fighting with them. Same goes for the woman with two shotgun heads as breasts, which is a reference to the fembots from the Austin Powers movies. I remember seeing these movies as a kid and was always amazed by these characters. These robots just have sex and violence in mind, which is how I think certain men view feminists, when they feel emasculated by them or wronged when women twist the narrative, objectifying themselves for profit, or in this case, to hurt them.

I then wanted to draw paper dolls that could be dressed up, as it alludes to the act of stripping, and serves to make the work interactive, placing the viewer in a compromising situation where they can reflect on the topic of objectification. I set up a clothesline to add to the universe I was creating and to expose more clothing to the viewers. I also hung apples to this, to symbolize the voyeuristic nature of my work, as if the viewers were neighbors looking at girl’s clothing in a lustful way. I drew many different types of clothes for the characters, many of them inspired by things I had seen/owned or found on the internet. I’ve been seing OHMIGHTY ads on my phone, which lead me to their website and found a lot of clothes with things like «blowjob queen» and other reductive things written on them. I find it shocking, as these clothes are marketed to a young audience, and wanted to show how these «rules of conduct» on how to be «a good woman» are presented to girls from childhood. Some clothes and dolls have an androgynous aspect to them, which serves to question how femininity is a performance (of gender).

My whole project serves to question how the viewer feels about objectification, as they might feel like playing with elements of my piece, but also reticent to do so as the context is violent.

Some people can sometimes find it pleasing to be objectified, if it’s consensual and they feel like they have control over the situation. Though through their observations, and mine, we’ve realized the line can be very thin regarding consent, or sometimes, because the objectification is consensual, men begin to classify that woman in a certain way, deeming her as being a «slut» and then treat her differently, excluding her from the other women he knows that are «respectable», like their moms for example. I’m also exploring another question; how consensual are women to their objectification? Like is my desire for objectifying myself just a kink or has it been fostered by the patriarchal system since my girlhood (social conditionning)?

To represent this, I drew a bukkake scene inspired by pornography materials, to represent an act where women are clearly objectified. In this situation, phalluses are replaced by guns, to clearly show a power imbalance, representing the patriarchy. By playing with the bullets (a metaphor for cum), the viewer is engaging in this act, which is just play. I didn’t want my reference to pornography to be too obvious, as I didn’t want to trigger anyone and really wanted to emphasize the playful aspects of kink, that offer a context to explore ideas that can seem «morally incorrect». This character is gazing at the apple, which represents lust, but we don’t know how consensual the act is. This is meant to add a nuance, I’m questioning consent in the context of pornography production, especially in scenes like these. 

My project is abject as I’m revealing how a scene like this seems playful, fun, and represents women in different ways, where one can play with them, which can also be seen as degradation (ex: by playing with the bullets or by undressing them).

Lastly, we also have vampires, one featured in the corner of the room and another one in the dolls. The one in the corner represents a habit I have, of chewing my own skin as a symptom of anxiety. This also represents how I feel, regarding this whole mess of a situation, and the guilt I feel for objectifying myself in certain situations, only after they happen. It also represents the physical detrimental aspects of using one’s body as a weapon, as it often leads one to self-destruction. I also think I was heavily inspired by monster highs, as they were the dolls I preferred to play with as a kid, and love to see women represented in ghoulish ways that subvert the innocent and calm narrative expected of women.

This work wasn’t about morality, it was about representations of women and situations, in a playful context, which blurs the lines of what’s acceptable and make the viewers realize the nature of the acts they’re participating in.