Cheminée Nord, Geneva
16.05.–15.06.2013
Title: Descent and return, 2013, rug, objects, collage
Exhibition: S.A.S. Escale à la Jonction
Artists: Christine Boillat, Crystel Ceresa, Marisa Cornejo, Elodíe Delomier, Angela Marzullo, Noha Mokhtar, Vania Repond, Lucía Mure, Cécile N’Duhirhae and Sahar Suliman
Curated by: Élodíe Delomier
Venue: Cheminée Nord, Geneva, Switzerland
Dates: 16.05.–15.06.2013
For this exhibition Cornejo uses a silhouette carved in an persian rug of the playboy icon Jane Mansfield to raise questions around feminism and decoloniality. Jayne Mansfield (April 19, 1933 – June 29, 1967) was an American actress in film, theatre, and television, a nightclub entertainer, a singer, and one of the early Playboy Playmates. She was a major Hollywood sex symbol of the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Mansfield was 20th Century Fox’s alternative to fill the big emptiness Marilyn Monroe had left and came to be known as the Working Man’s Monroe. In the society of the spectacle, the hunger of the market needed a new celebrity, Jane Mansfield’s flesh and spirit was exploited as any other woman in our system of production and reproducción of the patriarchal status quo that wants to reach progress at any cost. After succeeding like a comet she had the commun decline some celebrities suffer and died drunk in a car accident with her whole family. When the society of the spectacle got bored of her and wanted to dispose her like and old carpet, she became a desperate mess playing with satanism, drugs, alcohol and sex.
In 1995, I used her silhouette without knowing her biography to make a floor carpet in an exhibition called Hogar Dulce Hogar, in La Panadería in Mexico City, art critics, public and all stepped on her. Seventeen years later in Geneva I am using her silhouette again but as an homage to all women that get used like carpets and as an acceptance of all cycles of life we need to go trough to love ourselves. M. C.
