By appropriating objects found in the mass-market, artist Livia Marin reflects society's relationship with such products. She employs basic manipulation--such as sculpting, melting, breaking--to everyday objects, transforming them from the utilitarian shapes we are used to in to obscure, unfamiliar, and at times gaudy objects. As Marin explains on her website, "Central to the intervention deployed in my work is the trope of estrangement that works to reverse an excess of familiarity engendered in the life of the everyday and the dictates of the marketplace"
In Fictions of Use I (2004), Marin shaped 2,200 lipsticks in to elaborate shapes and arranged the objects in to an oval with a small opening. Visitors were encouraged to enter the oval. In effect, they found themselves encircled by varying shades of an altered, though common, woman's product. It is as if viewers were stepping in to a broken halo of two types of fabrication--both the assemblage of the mass-produced lipstick product and the fabrication employed by Marin to alter the familiar beauty objects.
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