Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature

In Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature, Suellen Rocca combined imagery inspired by hieroglyphics, advertisements, Sears catalogues, and children’s books to create a dreamscape of consumerist artifacts and tokens of womanhood. Some of these references are recognizable: price tags, furniture, and young girls playing. Others are organic yet inscrutable, unsettlingly familiar despite their illegibility. Overwhelming in its abundance of visual motifs, this work examines the fraught relationship between women and media. Rocca was a member of the Hairy Who, a collective of graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose work both complicated and poked fun at social mores such as gender, sexuality, beauty, and consumerism.