Relaxher

Relaxher is the artist's reinterpretation of the Just For Me No-Lye Conditioning Relaxer box marketed towards young Black girls in the 2000s. The original packaging, with its colorful design and friendly advertising, encouraged the chemical straightening of these girls' hair, causing permanent damage to their natural textures and self-perception. "Just For Me" has become "Just For You,” as the artist creates a self-portrait that replaces the original packaging's designs with her interpretations, subverting the manipulative marketing tactics used to undermine personal choice.

Relaxher explores themes of intersectional feminism and societal oppression and presents the relationship of kitsch, female expression, and the authoritarian male gaze, delving into the concept of women being transformed into products: docile, submissive, compliant, and controlled by the male gaze; the same gaze that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, perpetuating the pattern of stigmatizing and classifying female emotional expression s as "hysteria."  

The patriarchal production cycle exists in a continuous loop, with the male gaze classifying feminine-associated aesthetics as kitsch but using the same aesthetics to capitalize off of women and manipulate them and their ideals. Relaxher examines the insidious ways in which young black girls find themselves at the intersection of structures that capitalize off of their subjugation and package oppressive beauty standards into colorful advertisements targeted at impressionable young girls.