American Beauties: More Than Just a Pretty Face

By Paulina Ochi

David Levinthal's series "American Beauties" entices the imagination. Figurines of female silhouettes scantily clad, or not at all, are placed upon a mound of sand in front of a black backdrop. At first glance our senses are confused by the contradictions of the images. The face that the figures are toys connotes to child's play, but adults sense something deeper and perhaps even erotic in the images. We must look and look again to decide whether we see real women, or dolls. The bright foreground suggests it is daytime, but the background is unmistakably that of night. Levinthal's toy models allot him the power to create a fantasy world where, just as the horizon line separates light from dark, we see the separations between reality and the imagination, and form an understanding of how the "American Beauties" represent a larger American ideal.

Though we scarcely see their faces, the female toys manage to coax us to join them for an adult's play date. Just as a child might mimic her mother when playing house, our minds replicate all the term, "American Beauties" implies. Though the dolls stand alone, they represent a type rather than an individual. An "American Beauty" is goddess like, but simultaneously humorous, playful and deep. While the figures display the "robust 50s sexuality of the American Beauty," they do so in a way which emerges as more spiritual than erotic. Their poses are taunting, tempting, but at the same time innocent and meditative, as if the women are unafraid to confront the daunting black frontier.

The voids formed by what the images and the dolls lack (landscaped, life and identity) are filled by the imagination. Perhaps Levinthal wished the viewer to imagine the woman in a time and a place. He wanted the viewer to decide what she was thinking and feeling. He created a path for the viewer beginning with imagination and ending with an individual reality, thus embracing all at once the ideals of American ingenuity, individuality and possibility.

August, 2004