Talena Sanders, “Entrance to Return to Virtue” (2013), installation view at Power Plant Gallery, Durham, NC (all images courtesy the artist)
Teen girls’ Tumblr blogs are like the wallpaper of their minds gone public, while photographer Rania Matar captures teen girls in their bedrooms as an outsider. These two reflections of adolescence consider contemporary realities. In her installation “Return to Virtue“ (2013), artist Talena Sanders creates a fictional space of a Mormon teen girl’s fantasy bedroom — the kind she didn’t have growing up, despite being raised Mormon.
While Sanders’s peers were ravenously consuming publications like the Mormon monthly magazineThe New Era, tearing out pages and posting them to their walls, the artist was putting her creative energy towards dance classes. When she asked her parents why she didn’t have the material items her friends had, they reminded her that she could allot the money used for dance classes to purchasing goods from Mormon material culture instead. It was up to teenage Talena.
“I kept practicing dance, and then I would feel this real weight or guilt when I would go to someone else’s house and feel like that [participating in Mormon adolescent material culture] should be my priority,” Sanders told Hyperallergic. “I had faith in a lack of material goods.”
Read the full story on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/108921/a-mormon-teen-girls-fantasy-land/
