Installation: Psychoanalyst Trip-Dick

Installation of three portraits (dressmaker pins, foam dots, styrofoam, shadowbox frames) and three wired antique vibrators mounted in vitrines.

2003-2004

This piece explores the three prominent figures within the history of psychoanalysis who were instrumental in pathologizing hysteria as it related to women. Each portrait is assembled on styrofoam as a grandiose specimen of each man and constructed of thousands of foam dots impaled by dressmaker pins. Each image is clear from a distance but distorted up close; a relationship to the short-sightedness of scientific discovery, and the disparity between knowledge of the moment vs. that attained in hindsight. In front of each portrait is an antique vibrator, wired and activated by touching a button located inside a tube in front of the pedestal.  The vibrators are presented museum style, as relics of their time as they were used to treat hysteria at the turn of the 19th century. But there is also a satirical link to women’s pleasure implicit in these antique devices, particularly as viewers are invited to engage their operation.