She repeats herself

Gel transfer, graphite, paint, mixed media on canvas; monumental scroll format

This work integrates photographic material of a single doll—an actual object photographed by the artist—with digitally stretched faces of other dolls. These faces are overlaid and marked with red chalk crosses, a gesture that invokes erasure, rejection, and selection.

The red markings explicitly reference Marilyn Monroe’s practice of using red pencil to cross out images she disliked during her final Vogue photoshoot. By invoking Monroe, the artist establishes a parallel between mass-mediated femininity and enforced precocity. Monroe’s biography—marked by early trauma, institutionalization, and the absence of childhood—becomes a lens through which the doll imagery is recontextualized.

Here, dolls operate as surrogates for both the child and the celebrity body: surfaces onto which desire, discipline, and discard are projected. The red chalk simultaneously recalls correction, censorship, and violence, while remaining materially fragile and erasable. The work situates the artist’s own experience of internet fame within a longer historical continuum of women whose identities were constructed, consumed, and revised by public gaze.