Harry Wilkins Lives On

Last year, I posted a project that I completed a decade ago featuring a fictional character named Harry Wilkins.  In many ways, I still consider that series a prelude to the Marilyn Monroe photographs. A nameless person collected random lithographs from the 1950s or 1960s and stapled them together to form a narrative (Jesus to naked ladies to churchgoing families). This is the last image in the series:

When I was in Chicago over Memorial weekend, I was in a very peculiar and highly recommendable store called Woolly Mammoth.  I was shocked to discover the same family in a very different context:

It was one of those weird moments when everything I ever thought an image meant was disrupted and turned upside down. There was no perversity in the lithograph on this fan. It looked like something a religious woman would use while sitting in the pews of the church in a building lacking air conditioning. It did not have the redemptive quality of the stapled images found years ago. It was "normal" and suddenly that was the strangest moment of it all.

Harry Wilkins as a Prelude to Marilyn Monroe

Once upon a time, I created an artist's book entitled The Two Lives of Harry Wilkins. It was not a very successful artwork because the object itself was infinitely more interesting than what I did with it. Sadly, I no longer have the original object but I scanned slides today of the ratty pieces of paper that were stapled together that I individually photographed for the book in 2002. My father found this artifact that held my fascination because it was so bizarre. I still feel odd when looking at these images (maybe because of the combination of religion, race, and sex = topics I never deal with in my work). Lately, I have thought about this project A LOT because it elicits the same emotions I have about the Marilyn Monroe photographs that I am currently working on. Both involve obsessions (and busty blonds). "Harry Wilkins" is the name I created for the man I thought might own this object - a man using religion to hide his lust for naked women but ultimately returning to a pious lifestyle. Incidentally in the original object, there are identical versions of the last image stapled together - the repetition driving that point home.