Mannequins and Dummies as described by Kathleen Whitney

I want that dress, that hair, that posture, those gestures, the ideal body the manikin represents. The showroom and storefront with its jumbled or minimal display speaks directly to me, my desires, my habit of seeing myself in pieces; breast, thighs, hips, clothes; my fantasies of an existence where my identity shifts, changes, transforms with each outfit. Fashion is all about implication and these photographs coolly portray the vehicles that perform and advertise gender and desire.

Here are some of Ave Pildas’s images; the bewigged head of a woman sitting in the shallow display space of a beauty school’s window; a black torso who’s most surprising detail is a barely visible belly button. The focus of these intensely packed photos is the ghostly, symbolic presence of the female body within the synthetic shell of a manikin. Our minds reassemble the fragments of Pildas’s truncated female bodies; missing pieces don’t disturb us. We only see a body that wants us to want what she has. She is a transaction, a point of transfer.

Pildas’s decision to use black and white photography, rather than color, is significant. It transfers the image from a context considered a reflection of reality into an arena focusing on desire, fantasy, gender and commerce. The photographs are hard at work speaking fashion’s language of bodies, gestures, postures and unattainable perfection. Notably absent are those for whom this display exists – the men imagining the bodies beneath the clothes, the women fantasizing themselves wearing the clothes, or seeing within the blank manikins an ideal version of themselves.