Christy sculpts ladies of the South in 100% silicone. She is from Atlanta, where plastic surgery is a status symbol.
Christy works from photos she takes at grand social functions—and from case studies of less successful surgeries. Some of them may look a little dumb, but she loves them tenderly.
"Dearie Lovie"
Silicone Valley by Julie Mcguire,
NY Arts Magazine July/August Issue
Seductive, repulsive and vividly fresh, Christy Singleton’s silicone sculptures of plastic, surgery-obsessed southern women personify “Silicone Valley,” a provocative exhibition at New York’s P. S. 1 Gallery. Silicone, as the title of the show suggests, is a synthetic material commonly used for plastic surgery, but it also refers to the geographical area of Silicon Valley in Northern California, a term used in 1971 to describe the nexus of the dot-com phenomenon. The works in this show range from Peter Caine’s animatronic sculpture of God to Marlene McCarty’s drawings of young women who have killed family members, but it is the slyly satirical busts of Christy Singleton that successfully explore the intention of the show: our seduction by horror and the grotesque. In Singleton’s world, the valley is most definitely filled with plastic.
The sculptures of Christy Singleton depict the bizarre and very American world of plastic surgery failures. Physically, they hover between the deformity of a Marc Quinn sculpture and the anatomical impossibility of Lisa Yuskavage’s painted bimbos. Smiling wide-eyed ingénues, ageing divorcees, dumb blondes and cliché southern belles look vacantly out of polished silicone globs complete with fake eyelashes and hair. There is nothing politically correct here. And yet, on closer inspection, her representation of women is not so clear-cut. Singleton’s beauty junkies represent our society’s cosmetic surgery obsession. Like so many women (and a growing number of men), these people are vulnerable to the quest for physical perfection because of the premium American culture places on youthful beauty.
Rose, a mass of organic abstraction, stares at the onlooker, wide-eyed and with a gaping mouth. Her soft, amorphous head is taut and smooth with heavily painted facial features that dissolve into the texture of the silicone rubber itself. The similarly poised heads of Belle, Suellen, Olivia, Zelda, Fiona and Destiny present themselves as archetypes of aging beauties. Singleton exploits the weaknesses of these women in ways that feel fresh and are funny, grotesque, pathetic and beautiful, sometimes all at once. According to Singleton, her figures seem “as if they've had one too many stem cell cocktails to quell the signs of aging, and have a restless, finite angst against the imposing race of time. I have given these women only the ability to exist as glazed-eyed, lipsticked zombies.” These women are not to blame though. Hollywood has created a standard of beauty that doesn’t exist in nature—basically, pert, symmetrical features atop a skinny body with large breasts. With painful clarity, Singleton has managed to successfully update 80s star Barbara Kruger’s “Your Body is a Battleground” mantra by addressing 21st century issues of beauty—the battleground of plastic surgery.
Christy Singleton lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she works for sculptor Beverly Pepper. She continues to tackle the everlasting theme of beauty, and the grotesque results of forced attempts to achieve it. She is working on a new body of work that she has titled Bombshell, and whose characters she has described as monumental “bunioned, porn tit, armored anti-heroines.” In an age where technology often prevails, Singleton has found a way to reinvent figural sculpture and to maintain its prominent position in the context of contemporary art history.
