PAIGE NICOLE GORDON
JULY 9 - 30, 2021
I flip through my copy of the Anna Nicole Smith memorial playboy issue. I think of this magazine as one of my favorite historical objects, the kind of object I would grab in a fire or put in a time capsule. The intention of this object will always perplex me, is it like okay here’s some nudes of this girl we destroyed, it’s your last chance to jack off to the dead girl. There’s the better option which is are we respecting this woman’s career and craft one last time, which just happens to be inherently sexual. Either way it’s probably a little of both just like anything else. These types of questions are what I spend my days thinking about. I often feel I am in some sort of Stockholm syndrome relationship with all the women men have created for me. Whether it be the fictional ones too fabulous to ever live up to or the dead ones their society has destroyed. From the rib of Adam or the mind of the American film director. I’ve been trapped in this whirlpool since the moment I was titled Paige Nicole. Paige coming from a character played by Nicolette Sheridan on Knots Landing. Then Nicole an homage to the late Nicole Simpson. I think my mother was really expecting a size zero blonde. I mean with a little hair dye that is who she grew up as. I stare at my deflated sex doll in the corner, no amounts of mouth to nozzle will save her at
this point. Through my quest for answers about my own objectification I have destroyed her. She was really the first toy to enter my practice. Dolls, childhood crafts, and play have a large presence in my work, as children we use these things to help us start to understand the world. Play is a safe place to work ideas out in. Seems silly to me we think adults have all the answers, when we just have more complicated questions. Life is a puzzle, your first task is to try to find all the pieces. That’s the way I treat filmmaking. First shoot a bunch of puzzle pieces, with no idea of how they fit together. At the end of the day I create a picture that I needed to see. My work is constantly asking the question of is this culture a reflection of us or if we are a reflection of it, because of this I am often blending American pop culture phenomenon with personal diaristic narratives. I continue my search of where I learned to be a woman, whether that be kissing my sex doll on top of a life-size stuffed orca whale I sewed or at the grave of JonBenet Ramsey as I surround the grave with porcelain doll recreations I fabricated of her while my mother cries in the rental car.