This weekend, 14 women volunteered for the opportunity to look at their bodies as a work of art, not a work in progress.
Each one spent two hours working with Kansas City artist and activist Larry Kirkwood to create a plaster and resin cast of their naked torso from neck to mid-thigh.
The focus of the project is on aesthetics, how the shapes of each person's body work together to make a whole that is visually interesting and beautiful, he said. In the process, everyday people, posing as his models, have the chance to challenge their image of themselves and their definition of physical beauty.
"It's a very eye-opening experience to look at the space you occupy from outside the space you occupy," said Gretchen Obrist, who posed for the artist a couple months ago and organized his trip to Lincoln.
"The national advertisers try to segment you," Kirkwood said, gazing with a smile at four unfinished white plaster casts. "They never want you to look at how everything goes together. That's what we have to get used to doing. The collarbone, the shape of the armpit, that's us as much as the breast, stomach and thighs are."
Kirkwood began this art project with one exhibit five years ago. Since then, he's made more than 300 casts, using people of both genders in all shapes, sizes and ages as models.
Casts taken this weekend will be finished to resemble stone or bronze and become part of a larger "Body Images" exhibit in Lincoln in February. That exhibit and a production of playwright Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" are being planned as part of V-Day 2001, a movement to stop sexual violence against women.
"One of the really interesting things I found out is that if I close my eyes when I'm talking with the models, I probably couldn't tell if they were women or men," Kirkwood said. "We all want to be loved, to be accepted. The problem is getting people to accept this is not just a women problem or a minority problem, it's a human problem."
Waiting for their turn to pick a pose, be encased in warm Vaseline and two layers of plaster strips, then dried with a fan and hair-dryer, the play's director and producer said their nervousness about posing nude had all but vanished in the excitement of seeing themselves as art.
"We're stepping outside the box," Rachel Robinson-Keilig, producer of Lincoln's edition of "The Vagina Monologue," said. "We believe so strongly in the message, and we want to be part of the message."
Director Keri Wayne said Kirkwood's exhibit fits in well with the message women need to hear today. "The play and the V-Day movement is about reclaiming our bodies and about making our bodies sacred," she said.
For the women involved, the goals of the eyebrow-raising play and the visually arresting art exhibit go hand-in-hand in helping people to recognize where change is needed.
"Body image and sexual assault are so connected," Obrist said. "The violence we are expected to do to ourselves, trying to be thin, to be beautiful, the roots of those expectations are the same places that make rape what it is, the same places that make men think it's all right to rape a woman."
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