Playgirl Magazine

It took me three months of close and intense conversation with my mentors for me to decide to tackle this daunting project. Not because of the work involved, or any potential fallout from the choice, but three months to suss out what I wanted this piece to mean.  The fact that PLAYGIRL Magazine trusted me to conceptually and artistically explore my vision- sealed the deal.

While on the surface, posing for PLAYGIRL Magazine was a beautiful and exciting art project, I wanted to dig deeper. Speaking as the Political Science student that I am (here in NYC at The New School), I realized that this project offered me an opportunity to directly challenge American views of nudity and human sexuality.

I wanted to explore ways in which to challenge the status quo, and to start an intelligent conversation around how we, as Tom Ford recently argued, are perfectly willing to exploit and to find tantalizing female nudity, but that we are scared of the penis.  What’s up with that? 49% of all Americans have one!  BRAVO!

On a more macro-level, I wanted to look at our natural but unfortunate tendency to label ourselves  – or attempt to – through labels of our clothing, or those of neat but often inaccurate labels about sexualities, and even race relations. We use these stereotyping labels to try to order our perception of the reality around us, even when the labels are discriminatory, stigmatizing, and dangerous – often driving underground internal homophobia, shame and violence.  My work here was to “drop labels” in every conceivable meaning of that construct.

Tagged as: playgirl