Marilyn Print

With full, red lips and a coy artificial beauty mark - Golden Age goddess Marilyn Monroe cultivated a brand of sensual, sultry beauty that captivated the world and fundamentally influenced modern concepts of femininity and sexuality. Her revolutionary style continues to be standardized, replicated, and mass produced. Summarized, simplified, and plagiarized until all it takes is a set of red lips and a black dot to call forth images of Marilyn or invoke a sense of feminine sexuality - the legacy of Monroe as a sex symbol and beauty icon can be seen in every store, throughout media, and woven into the very fabric of what society considers lovely and desirable. Her visage permeates our culture - and we are willing partakers as we thirstily drink in the experience of her iconic expression of beauty. The phenomena of our obsession is not limited to Monroe however, as we humans seem to desperately cling to any scrap of loveliness that we have the fortune to come across. Monroe, flowers, music, perfumes, colors - even simple geometric patterns that please us - humans are addicted to aesthetic experiences and the perceived warmth of icons. It seems to be a fundamental element of our human identity and psyche. As we decorate our walls with posters of Marilyn Monroe, so too did our ancestors decorate the walls of their caves with the images that fascinated them. Marilyn is a piece that explores our need to surround ourselves with icons. In a society where individualism is celebrated, icons help to remind us that we are all part of something larger than ourselves. In many ways, they are the glue that hold society together. Whether we realize it or not, icons play an important role in our lives.