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McMaster Gallery presents Dawn Hunter’s “Spectacle Spectacular: Wonder Woman’s Island” through September 13.

By Judit Trunkos

McMaster Gallery presents Dawn Hunter’s “Spectacle Spectacular: Wonder Woman’s Island” through September 13. In her exhibition of paintings and mixed media pieces, Hunter shares her observations on young women’s psychological and social changes due to the influence of fashion advertising, fashion magazine images and aggressive marketing tools.

Hunter, an assistant professor of studio art and the coordinator of Studio Art Fundamentals at USC, studied and researched popular fashion magazines for 20 years, paying special attention to Vogue, to better understand the direction in which these “fashion-dictators” seemed to push their readers. At the McMaster exhibition, Hunter’s mostly black and white mixed media paintings portray the results of the magazine’s influence on the 1980s and 90s. Her strong critique of those fashion trends is visualized by the young women’s behavior on her canvases, their look and their selection of outfits. Hunter suggests that by pushing for a provocative attitude and dress, most young girls become copy cats of the models of Vogue and adopt its materialistic attitude, which, in turn, makes them pay more attention to expensive outfits and less attention to human qualities.

According to Hunter, during the 80s and 90s many women were manipulated by Vogue’s advertisements. Hunter’s work titled ”Captured Charm” specifically picks on high-class restaurant goers, who spend lots of time and money at overpriced coffeehouses and restaurants just to fit the image. By mimicking the magazine’s trend and each other, these women melt into fake business, Barbie-like shadows and disappear into the crowd of the restaurant.

The time frame Hunter is observing was also well-known for its strong feminist movement. But Hunter says she wanted to avoid any overtly feministic messages.

“It was not my intention to suggest that these works are in any ways feminist,” she says. “My goal with this exhibition is to visualize my observation about the effects of popular fashion magazines on young women’s behavior.”

Modern fashion dictates that girls must be aggressively sexual and provocative which may completely hide the personality and intellect of the person. Appearance becomes the top priority to fit in. The critique thus lies in the strong images of the seemingly perfect female figures of “Bling Bling: Boobatopia,” in which the characters seem to lose their individuality in the effort to seem perfect from the outside. In this large canvas, Hunter brings together seven young women from different backgrounds, some are possibly students, some are dancers and some are professional business women but despite their diverse backgrounds they all have one thing in common: they all live and die to look like a cover girl from Vogue. Hunter’s message is clear. Due to fashion advertisers’ manipulations, women devote all their attention to their appearance, leaving them intellectually and emotionally dead behind a seemingly perfect body, make-up and hair.

“With this piece I am contrasting women that are fully clothed posing seductively with those who are barely wearing anything,” Hunter says about “Bling Bling: Boobatopia.” “I also made this piece shiny and vivid so your eyes cannot settle on the body, while in the magazine you are supposed to focus on the bodies.”

With the financial assistance of a USC Research and Productive Scholarship Grant, the 2006 Josephine Abney research Fellowship and the Puffin Foundation Ltd Grant, Hunter’s current body of work will travel over the next year for exhibitions at the Mesquite Art Center in Dallas, the Rogue Community College in Oregon and at Brown University.