Masquerading as ‘Vanity’ Fare : Misfits and Peculiar Beauties Populate Deborah Brown’s Mindscape

Artist Deborah Brown lived the “picture perfect” childhood with all the upper-middle class trappings. But the country-club patina faded as she matured.

“I felt trapped,” Brown says, “by desires to assume the facade--the clothes, the money--the whole presentation of a lady in a certain social strata. I started realizing the emptiness of it and that I couldn’t quite break free from wanting those things. There was a certain self-criticism.”

What to do? Brown turned the self-criticism into “self-mockery” and made three-dimensional art: a bejeweled, high-heeled beauty with a beach-ball-size lemon for a belly. Hideous! A glamorous, buttery-blonde Barbie with octopus tentacles instead of legs. Freakish! A prissy brunette wearing pearls and sporting the body of a squirrel. A mermaid with a corncob for a head. Grotesque!

Brown’s bevy of misfits, collectively titled “Vanity Fair,” is on exhibit at Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite. She makes her fantastic hybrids, Frankenstein-style, by piecing together parts of dolls and mannequins, plastic fruits, vegetables and toy animals and adorning them with frilly boas and gaudy, obviously fake jewels.

The use of “cheap replicas” for raw material is her commentary on how society reveres the false facade.

“There’s so much strange emptiness and perversity in what’s made for people to consume,” she said. “It’s almost as if faux is better and prettier than real.”

An emerging artist who made toys as a kid, Brown, 27, got her master of fine arts degree at UC Irvine in 1993.

“Vanity Fair” isn’t just about the pressure to look model-gorgeous or to be part of the yachting crowd, she said in a phone interview from her St. Louis home. It’s about a basic human desire to fit in--shared by all, regardless of sex or socioeconomic status--and the vain effort to sublimate one’s true self to do so.

“It’s like ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ” Brown said, referring to “Queen Bee,” her citrus-bellied beauty. “You look like you’re supposed to be all dolled up and pretty, but you have a lemon stomach. Even if you think you’re pulling it off or you’re beautiful, your real identity will come out. You can only deny so much. It’s like going to a cocktail party and blurting out something (inappropriate).”

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Anger over the perceived need to be somebody you’re not, Brown said, is represented by the sadistic grins of bee-like hybrids--part bee, part duck--buzzing around the life-size “Queen Bee.”

Various “Vanity Fair” dolls’ vacuous stares and aloofness--each is isolated in the exhibit and none interact--reflect a profound loneliness. You can’t truly “bond” without revealing your inner self, she said. “It’s all about superficial connections to others.”

Underneath it all, these conflicted souls just want to be loved, Brown said.

On one level, “they want to be snobby and cha-cha-cha or ultra feminine--and in a sense grossly feminine. But what they really want is to be loved,” she said. “The work is about the conflict of who they are, who they think they are, and how others perceive them. It’s about that whole struggle of identity and perception.”

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Brown, who had a solo show at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year, has no trepidation that she’ll be perceived as selling out for her dealings with Barneys New York.

The exclusive retail clothing boutique commissioned her last year to make “Queen Bee” and “Octavia,” the Barbie-cum-octopus, for display in its New York shop windows. The materials she used came from the shop’s wholesalers’ catalogue of window display items.

“The museum environment is limited and exclusive,” she said, “and artwork should be public. I don’t make it to be purchased by a collector and stuck in their house. I want people to feel the work and understand it, and hopefully it will help them see their own life more clearly. Having it sequestered is counterproductive.”

* “Deborah Brown: Vanity Fair,” is at Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite, 3333 Bristol St., Suite 1000, Costa Mesa. Hours are noon-9 p.m., Monday through Friday; 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Saturday; 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Sunday. Through July 16. Free. (714) 662-3366.