Strayed. Western Cape, South Africa, 2014 - 2015.
Our lives are governed by a capitalist system that is unsustainable and destructive. To me, the storefront mannequin, a populist icon of materialist artifice in our time, becomes a concrete symbol here: the very embodiment of soulless consumerism, promoting grotesque and unattainable ideals to a global covetous culture, on every conceivable level.
The mannequin is transformed into a ghostly metaphor for our money-driven society’s alienation from the sacred beauty and flow of the natural world, and therefore, from itself.
Vapidly mocking female flesh, it is almost as if she stands between us and the primal abundance of Mother Earth.
Our eye is drawn to this figure in the frame, an echo sounding from deep within our subconscious. She seems to have strayed from some haunted dream, ever encased in robotic sleep.
There’s something human there, but at the same time there is not.
The uneasy truth is, we’re looking in part at what we have become. Both fragile and divine, elegant and monstrous.
Home, but utterly lost.
