Artist Plays Up Mocks of Distinction

“D eborah Brown: Vanity Fair,” a quirky installation exploring “feminine fashion, fantasy and emptiness,” is at Laguna Art Museum’s satellite gallery at South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, through July 16.

Brown, a graduate of UC Irvine, UC San Diego and Otis College of Art and Design, takes apart dolls and toys to create female figures adorned with cosmetic jewelry, fake fur and marabou feathers. She says her sculptures explore the attraction and contempt we have for Barbies and living dolls.

Brown’s work has been displayed in several solo and group shows. She has also created window environments for Barneys New York, including the store in Costa Mesa.

This is another in a series of first-person columns that allow people connected to the fashion industry to talk about their encounters.

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This exhibit mocks fashion, and maybe I’m not really the one who should talk, since I’m completely implicated in fashion.

I’m making a comment that, in our society, there are people who, for the sake of wanting to belong, have adopted identity through fashions that are not honest and don’t allow them to be as individual as they should be.

It’s asking the question, what if a plastic misfit toy somehow finds a fur to put on? Is it glamorous? It’s a critique of fantasy and adornment, but there is also fun in the work. There is the haunting side, the consciousness behind it, but there is still an optimistic, embracing tone as well.

My work is showing the ugliness behind all that decoration. The pieces are adorned misfits. They are sort of freaks in their own right. They are amalgams of various things that have to do with identity, how women see themselves.

There are an elephant head, a baby head and other strange mixtures. They are used to get the most haunting effect, to better communicate emptiness juxtaposed to the fluff. The figures are supposed to be happy and part of a group, but they are uniquely disturbed.

As a heterosexual woman, I feel I’m in drag when I look at the trappings that I fall into through media and upbringing. What I have found is, I assume an identity that has been prescribed to me as a person in this world. It’s not just a female-only thing.