The Trophy Wives Prep Program

The Trophy Wives Prep Program examines how idealized roles for women are constructed, rehearsed, and sustained through cultural narratives, visual language, and systems of reward. The work is framed as a fictional training program, in which familiar figures are recast as participants learning how to perform desirability, compliance, and ambition within narrowly defined expectations.

Rather than presenting empowerment as a stable outcome, the project focuses on the costs of assimilation and proximity to authority. It considers how participation—sometimes strategic, sometimes unconscious—can reinforce structures that limit agency while offering the illusion of advancement. Status, protection, and recognition are revealed as conditional and transactional rather than liberatory.

Each sculpture is a 3D-printed figure, hand-painted and placed on a digitally designed, laser-cut pedestal. These hybrid forms—part consumer object, part ceremonial artifact—operate as satirical markers of aspiration, self-preservation, and cultural belonging.

By exaggerating the rituals of preparation and polish, The Trophy Wives Prep Program functions as both critique and cautionary reflection, asking how inherited expectations continue to shape behavior, visibility, and value in public life.

Painted 3D prints mounted on laser-engraved boxes. 2021-22.