Drawings of Campus Cuties

In these graphite portraits, mass-produced Campus Cuties are scaled up, slowed down, and made newly strange. Tight croppings, enlarged formats, and careful tonal modeling monumentalize what was once disposable, while soft gradations of graphite mimic stone more than plastic, lending the figures a classical, almost funerary weight. Half-lidded eyes, pursed mouths, and fixed gestures register as fatigue, endurance, or quiet resistance rather than flirtation; the ambiguity is intentional.

Formally, the drawings hinge on friction—between polished surfaces and visibly worked textures, between elegant contour and the awkwardness of frozen poses, between the intimacy of drawing and the anonymity of mass production. The shift from glossy plastic to graphite’s slow, haptic mark renders the figures more vulnerable and perceptive, as if sustained looking might restore an interior life to objects designed to remain surface-level. Subtle framing details—pinholes, page edges, flashes of gilded borders—reassert authorship and value, recasting trinkets as reliquaries.

Conceptually, the series extends an ongoing inquiry into how privilege, influence, and proximity to authority are visually produced and absorbed. Enlarging these figures turns the lens back on the systems that shaped them, transforming idealized forms into sites of reflection rather than consumption. The drawings function as both record and reckoning—documents of how representation circulates, and meditations on what is constrained or erased in the process.

Rives BFK paper, graphite, gold leaf. 2016-ongoing.