The Lollipop Girls' Arsenal - Limited Edition 1 of 7 Photograph

Puberty is a transition that includes the wrapping up of the state of youth in which storybooks and make-believe are not fantasy but fabricate meaning. Becoming installed into adulthood brings with it (because humans use language) presenting oneself and reading others as objects. This feature has pleasant and unwelcome aspects and is a playground on which identity is tried on or staged. The fantasies we have of who we are develop from the (Object) Lessons delivered by experience and culture. Because fantasy organizes our experience of everyday reality and tells us who we are, we are also subject to Desire (the memory of the missing thing). I use the language of advertising and commercial photography to point to Fantasy (and the Real in other bodies of work) to suggest that life’s pretends (when taken responsibility for) are the portal through which we get closest to a return to childhood splendor.