Mikala Guyton - "The Dunce and the Faulty Dream"

The painting that I created for the visual project not only pays homage to my own experiences as a young girl, but to the experiences of many women, who at one point during their young adulthood, felt inadequate.

The painting depicts a young girl who is wearing pastel and beige (what could be considered boring colors) and a “dunce” cap who is imagining a girl who is wearing more extravagant clothing with stronger colors. The girl feels inadequate --which is evident in from the "dunce" cap-- because she does not look like the girl that she is imagining, and she dreams of becoming this ideal of perfection.

These feelings that the girl has are not purely self-inflicted. These ideals of perfection are derived from the images all around her: on television, in magazines, and in movies. I used images from Teen Vogue to help portray this. Teen Vogue is a magazine targeted at younger girls, feeding them the message that this is what they should strive to look like when they get older. As with many other aspects of media in society, these messages force young women to compare themselves with images that are unrealistic, and girls are often humiliated by others for not being able to live up to these images.

A young girl's sexuality is also thrown into a state of confusion. The girl being imagined has no face. She is wearing revealing and tight-fitting clothes. She is wearing white, a common symbol of purity, as well as crimson red, a symbol of lust or eroticism. I wanted to show the virgin-whore dichotomy that plagues the minds of many young girls. This same dichotomy was also present in the film That Obscure Object of Desire. Conchita was expected to both give-in to Mathieu while also rejecting him and staying virginal. Because of this, she became an object, or a challenge to conquer. So much so that it didn’t even matter that the actress changed. Who Conchita really was didn't matter.  

Within society, women are expected to be pure and virginal while also being lascivious and desirable. This is an impossible standard to live up to! And why should women have to? I wanted to bring attention to the difficulties women face while growing-up, especially when it comes to growing into their sexuality.