Raggedy Ann to Real Doll

In Raggedy Ann to Real Doll I transformed the storefront window of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions into an operating theatre as one of America’s most beloved dolls went under the knife.

As I performed cosmetic procedures, projected video and remote voyeurism from a live stream provided multiple onsite and virtual opportunities for spectatorship – with the possibility to experience surgery from the gallery sidelines, externally through the windows, or directly engage with the patient.

I created this experience to dissect what is just beneath the surface of our collective preoccupation for physical perfection and to examine how we negotiate the contagion of identity – a repetition of a repetition for which there is no original – in an ever-shifting landscape of technologies that can drastically alter and re-map the body.

* While the original performance was 3 hours long, the above video (created with Chris Sheets) has been compressed into ten minutes

CHRONOLOGY