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In line at Michael’s craft store to purchase more necklace clasps, bling and plastic packaging, Allie Pohl fiddled with the silver chains around her neck that display bright yellow and neon orange shapes.
Stepping up to the register she was greeted with, “Ooo! What is that on your necklace? A cat?” by the female cashier.
“No, it’s the Barbie doll crotch,” Pohl responded with a smile.
“Oh, I’m not of that generation,” said the cashier as her cheeks and neck grew rosy and then turned a deep crimson.
“But the Barbie doll is over 50 years old!” said Pohl.
“You caught me off-guard.”
Pohl is a graduate student in the Electronic Media Arts Design program, and some of her sculptures and necklaces are on exhibit at the Illiterate Gallery in the “Where the Wild Things Art” exhibit that opened Friday.
Her porcelain sculpture pieces, “Ideal Woman: Astroturf A and B” and the “Ideal Woman: Necklace” derive from an artistic interpretation of the Barbie doll cropped at the midsection. Pohl has created an icon that examines the fetish, hits on feminism and is chic and sexy all at once.
“I fell in love with the shape and I knew I wanted it to be part of who I was at that moment,” said Pohl about the icon she has created by cropping the Barbie doll outline at the belly button and the lower thigh, framing the crotch.
Pohl hung the pendant on chains to be worn as necklaces. Pohl started a blog (idealwoman.wordpress.com) for wearers of the necklace to share stories of interactions while wearing the necklace and to read others’ experiences.
The idea stemmed from her work during undergrad at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., where her work explored female hair removal. In her early work at DU, she created a life-size porcelain version of a Barbie doll with strategically grown chia sprouts.
“Now we live in the world where there’s a better version of the real,” said Pohl.
She attributes this to technology. With the ability to make things more perfect and ideal via technology, the fetish becomes an obsession.
“We fetishize women, Barbie dolls, you know, the perfect breasts, the perfect grass, the perfect whatever,” said Pohl. The fetish element extends to the process of wearing the crotch shape as a necklace and the fetish of jewelry and beautification, said Pohl.
Pohl’s technological process involved creating the shape with Adobe Illustrator and then sending the image to a company that produces the Plexiglas cutouts. She then assembles them into necklaces. The pendants are available in eight different colors as part of the first edition. Other editions are to follow.
“This is a factory-type experience,” said Pohl, “and this is how females are becoming, we’re cookie-cutters.”
Visit alliepohl.com for more information on purchasing necklaces, to view her other work and for information on exhibits.
