Installation view of Holly Rios’ UMOCA exhibit where, above a heap of discarded magazines, a veiled figure with the words “I used to dream of being pretty enough to be kept like in a jar or under the floorboards,” invoking childhood fantasies warped by a culture of possession and concealment.

In a fever dream, a teenager makes a solitary visit to a relative’s home when no one is around. Descending to the basement, the youth passes swiftly through the familiar game-and-TV room, friendly and open to the sky through windows high in the walls, and enters an inconspicuous, enclosed space in the back, where the uncle’s pin-ups line the walls and, at the climax of the trespass, finds the prize: an enormous stash of men’s magazines. Three hundred at least, mostly Playboys, with their deliberate choice to evoke the girl next door that makes them the most accessible to developing sensibilities. In each, clean-cut young women, themselves barely out of high school and behaving just as they might be seen doing in everyday life, are found to be, magically, undressed. In this version, the magazines have fallen in a messy heap on the floor, making them irresponsibly accessible, with no danger that a secret violation of practiced norms will be detected or exposed.

But this is not a dream. This is the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and as befits museum practice, the pin-ups are isolated in frames behind panes of glass. In fact, they are doubly removed, because Holly Rios, the person responsible for this exhibition in UMOCA’s Artist in Residence Gallery, has used her printmaker’s skills, honed in the University of Utah program that first drew her here from her native Colorado, to first erase and then appropriate the original, paradigmatic images. Only the pile of magazines is exposed, protected solely by the convention that forbids touching museum exhibits. Instead, visitors to UMOCA may well experience a palpable, physiological conflict between an urge to yield to their siren call: “Pick me up. Look inside. Everything you desire, all that you fear, can be found within . . . .” and socially induced revulsion at finding themselves confronted in what is, after all, a public space, filled with the forbidden fruit of a warped psychosexual orchard. The result is a more emotionally turbulent visit than the customary, anticipated, elevated—and elevating—experience.

“Every woman already knows this narrative; why bother making more of it?” Holly Rios asked herself this question even before she began the work. One answer that comes to mind is the straightforward equation at work in what she has labeled “I’d like to return this body.” It’s a simple derivative of basic capitalism, but one that uncovers a complex cultural mathematics. As sketched in the exhibition statement, it argues that the total output of any means of expression reveals the influence said medium exerts over the society that produces it. As large an investment in a particular paradigm of sexual roles and their performances as was made by Playboy enterprises and their extended commercial family for sixty-plus years and counting is bound to have broad and lasting impacts and repercussions in their host society that will not soon dissipate.

Rios determined to use her artistic skills as much as possible in response to what must have been an ambivalent, if not outright unwelcome, donation of the raw (pun intended) material that bolsters her AiR exhibition. Much of the disruption Rios directs at those source materials is visual. In “Redacted Form,” a suite of nine graphite reductions of the “candid” photos typically found in men’s magazines, the backgrounds are meticulously rendered but the women’s bodies are reduced to blank silhouettes. These images serve to introduce, recall, or calibrate the look of the subject matter in a relatively neutral manner … or perhaps to jumpstart the viewer’s own imagination. They certainly wouldn’t seem out of place in a conventionally “artistic” display.

Continuing around the room, however, viewers encounter individual examples of this genre that Rios has more elaborately interfered with. Earlier, for her BFA, she studied both printmaking and poetry, which makes her something of an anomaly in the visual arts, where text is generally treated as a graphic element. Consequently, she was well equipped to not just disrupt, but to invert with increasingly repellent texts the “come hither” character of the works she chooses. “I used to dream of being pretty enough to be KEPT, like in a jar or under the floorboards” is written across one figure’s space to invoke the way embarrassing or shameful materials are often hidden, whether to protect the owner’s self image or to protect that individual from others motivated in ways the owner understands only too well.

Good art should also be good science, and scientific research requires evidence, so Rios has covered a wall with her most damning discovery. Playboy is known for its “gatefold” centerpiece, in which a larger photograph than its pages could accommodate has been folded twice in order to fit. Generally, the otherwise wasted backs of these removable pages are filled with personal information about the model who appears on the other side. Perusing these Q-and-A’s, Rios discovered that not only are the models visibly, remarkably similar types, but their ages and personal stories—assuming these are real and not made up—are too. Clothed images may also appear, but her most disturbing discovery turned out to be family photos of the subject a few years earlier, when she was a child. While these are surely intended to reinforce the image of the model as wholesome and anything but the victim of child abuse and lifelong exploitation that readers may anticipate her being, the propriety of placing an image of a child on the reverse of her naked figure seems more than a bit questionable.

At this point, readers and viewers alike might wonder how much, in an age when the Internet and social media, contrary to their early promises of cultural advancement, have delivered far worse examples of racism and sexism than the editors of Playboy could have imagined, can the arts’ audience be expected to care about the relatively mild transgressions of a largely obsolete periodical. Of course Rios’ point is that those lapses were influential on multiple generations who encountered them, down to today. Yet further, and arguably much more important, examples come from numerous national and international journalists who draw on links between the antiquated sexual dimorphism of formerly influential entertainments like Playboy and the American political right wing’s fractured perception of world powers.

What our domestic commentary largely misses is the extent to which our own political class uses such a metaphorically sexualized template in generalizing about international events. The historian Robert Kagan, to take just one particular example, has facetiously written that to those influential persons, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” His comment, which evokes John Gray’s influential book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, mocks similar comments made by many of America’s apparent leaders, who are possessed of a hypermasculine national self-image that relegates much of the rest of the world to an effeminate role: one that is similar to the one imposed on women who appeared to be powerless and effectively irrelevant in the male world depicted in Playboy. In short, the social relegation suffered by those women so long ago has become an equally degrading view not just of one half the population, but of entire nations. In no way can this be dismissed as inconsequential.

In their final exhibitions, artists in residence often address important issues of broad concern. How many of their questions speak with equal power to individuals who have been injured by attacks on their sense of self-worth and those who worry about our national values is open to question. Deliberately or not, Holly Rios has come up with such a question, and the excitement about her work is correspondingly evident at UMOCA. More than just a matter of demeaning assaults on dignity, this show asks us to look closely at our national soul.

Rios’ wall of Playboy model bios in Parasocial Pornographic underlines the homogeneity of the women featured and critiques the illusion of intimacy and individuality in mass-produced desire.

Holly Rios: I’d like to return this body, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through May 31.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.