The Fantasia Morose (2000)

medium: paper collage

With The Fantasia Morose, Mark Laliberte has generated a body of work based on an exploration of beauty, perfection, and aesthetics in reference to the mainstream culture's photographic manipulation of the female form as an outward document of its internalized desires and dreams.

In the creation of over 50 assemblages for this series, Laliberte takes on the role of artist as immoral creator, a kind of Frankenstein figure working with paper as a metaphor for flesh. He manipulates found body imagery in an attempt to bring forth new life, photo-collages of exotic and distorted hand-assembled girls.

At the start of his process, the artist acts as a cultural gravedigger, searching out appropriate parts which he culls from a never-ending ocean of mainstream photographic imagery. Every month magazine and media culture (Hollywood, fashion, fitness, pornography) use the body as a fascinating and decorative surface and visually describe it as a covering easily transformed and altered... as changeable as any costume or article of clothing. From this well of idealized stills, a prototype has emerged into mass conscious; these sculpted images have replaced nature as an ideal. Elective surgery has become a plastic passion for the masses, an acceptable (and curiously desirable) process of conforming to socially inscribed definitions of beauty.

In his quest for celebrity body parts, Laliberte takes no moral or political position in relation to this public acceptance of the body as a fetish object, a commodity, a unit of display. Still, what he presents in this work positions itself outside of the present definition of comfortably accepted beauty. Stripping away the high gloss and glitter that accompanies the material at its source, all body-oriented material is photocopied, resized and distorted to create an immediate distancing effect from its original image. Laliberte then acts as a surgeon, assembling and reassembling these photocopied parts into complex composite forms, applying his own manipulations to the constructs in question.

The artist plays a male version of a game of paper dolls where each part is fitted directly onto the next, a puzzle-process that eventually produces new bodies. The physical features of many different photographed women (mostly of a celebrity nature) mix and mingle together within his collages, all a part of the patchwork. The splices are rough, and the seams are messy; there is no attempt to hide the patchwork process that is employed. The original identities are buried in the mix and new personas surface. Much of the process is focused on capturing a particular pose or (uncomfortable) gesture, and in sculpting composite facial features that are believable (and nearly always frozen in an ultra-serious runway mask).

The results of Laliberte's efforts are often off-balanced, slightly monstrous... and yet they remain as dangerously seductive as the photographic images from which they initially spring. Hideous at their core, these photo-collages also seem to radiate with an odd sense of exotic beauty. There is a surface tension in The Fantasia Morose that challenges the comfortable gaze of the viewer, challenges them to look beyond the 'surface' of things, and into the strange, almost post-human world he creates - a place where bodies are mutable, and the skin, like canvas, is just another surface to explore.

In a world where we are treating our bodies like objects that can be changed by will and science, the relentless idealization in commercial photographic imagery can be looked at as evidence that we as a race do indeed prefer culture over nature. In the breakdown of things, we are all caught up in a process where skin becomes photograph becomes collage becomes a map for new skin... and in this context Mark Laliberte's The Fantasia Morose series may provide an arm's length glimpse of the mainstream tastes of the future.

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All of the pieces are one-of-a-kind, black-matted, in metal frames with single-diamond glass.

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