{"id":92117,"date":"2025-04-10T07:57:41","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T14:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=92117"},"modified":"2025-05-11T21:06:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T04:06:59","slug":"holly-rios-umoca-show-peels-back-the-glossy-surface-of-a-cultural-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/holly-rios-umoca-show-peels-back-the-glossy-surface-of-a-cultural-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"Holly Rios’ UMOCA Show Peels Back the Glossy Surface of a Cultural Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A

Installation view of Holly Rios’ UMOCA exhibit where, above a heap of discarded magazines, a veiled figure with the words \u201cI used to dream of being pretty enough to be kept like in a jar or under the floorboards,\u201d invoking childhood fantasies warped by a culture of possession and concealment.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a fever dream, a teenager makes a solitary visit to a relative\u2019s 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\u2019s pin-ups line the walls and, at the climax of the trespass, finds the prize: an enormous stash of men\u2019s 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.<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s Artist in Residence Gallery, has used her printmaker\u2019s 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: \u201cPick me up. Look inside. Everything you desire, all that you fear, can be found within . . . .\u201d 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\u2014and elevating\u2014experience.<\/h4>\n

\u201cEvery 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\u2019d like to return this body.” It\u2019s 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.<\/h4>\n