“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

David Hume

“In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.”

Immanuel Kant

This immersive artwork invites the viewer to consider personal notions of this original aesthetic: beauty, and through an unexpected context, their own reflection becomes the subject of the work.

Beauty Box has two levels of endeavour. Firstly, it is an interactive experience where the participant enters a curtain enclosed booth, where inside, the box end reveals a rectangular window which beckons peering into, and in doing so the viewer finds themselves reflected in the unexpected context: that of being framed in a tradition of European art, the gold gilt frame. The viewer, now implicit in a framed context, hears an audio track from deep within the box, aiding the intrigue and inviting further engagement. Heard, a voice recites 79 quotes which attempt to describe and define beauty. Citing Socrates to Miley Cyrus, the words offer a multi-layered narrative with which to juxtapose the overt ornateness of the frame, and in doing so, invite a questioning of the viewer’s own context to the framed face staring back at them.

Secondly, the box functions as a mini photographic studio whereby “traditional” portraits can be taken autonomously at the instigation of the viewer. An explanation of the artist’s intent on the exterior face of beauty box offers an option to participate in the capturing of images, and the pushing of the white button within the booth showing complicity. When the button is pushed, lights are turned on and create a pleasing light with which the viewer now see themselves. In turn, a camera from within the box and behind the one-way mirror, captures 12 images, 1 every 5 seconds. At that conclusion, the lights and camera are reset and suggest that either the go is over, or the button needs re-pushing.

Beauty Box was conceived as a means with which to consider the modern notion of beauty in the context of traditional, western definitions. Aside from the superficial mores of consumer and media expressions of this aesthetic, I believe that there is a far deeper appreciation of beauty which lies as a discernible guide to that which we desire, as well as aspire. I believe that beauty is not a quality in things themselves, but that the experience of, and reflection upon, reveals how we each use this aesthetic as a compass to ultimate moral and sensory fulfilment.

This action and encounter constituted the art experience, the subsequent photography is the documentation of this.

see the documentation images from the beauty box installs here

these quotes are heard within the beauty box…

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.  Leo Tolstoy  Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical   Sophia Loren   Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.  William Blake  Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.  Edmund Burke   I am a thing of beauty.  Frank Sinatra   Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.  Fyodor Dostoevsky I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.  Whitney Houston   Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.   Marcus Tullius Cicero   Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.   Oliver Wendell Holmes   The ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never found.   Joan Rivers   The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.   Francis Bacon   There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.   Charles Baudelaire   Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.   Francis Bacon   I don’t want to be perfect, but I do want to be a role model. My mom always tells me that imperfections equal beauty. All of us are imperfect. Miley Cyrus  An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.   Charles Baudelaire   Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.   Charles Baudelaire  The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.   David Hockney  Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick. Gwyneth Paltrow Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.  David Hume   Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.  Henry Rollins   The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.   Susan Sontag   Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don’t have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there’s poetry written right on the bathroom wall.   Ani DiFranco   Beauty and the devil are the same thing.   Robert Mapplethorpe   Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.   Martha Beck   I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.   Charles Baudelaire   Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.   Martha Beck   Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.   Milan Kundera   Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.  David Byrne   Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?   Paul Gauguin    Nonsense and beauty have close connections.   E. M. Forster   The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.    Joan Collins   There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.   Francis Bacon   The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.   Havelock Ellis   There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.   Oscar Wilde   What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.   Albrecht Durer   Beauty is grace and confidence. I’ve learned to accept and appreciate what nature gave me.   Lindsay Lohan   The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.   Charles Baudelaire  I have found a definition for beauty. It is something intense and sad, something a little vague, leaving scope for conjecture.   Charles Baudelaire  All artwork is about beauty; all positive work represents it and celebrates. All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives.   Agnes Martin   The idea that beauty is not important is the real beauty myth.   Nancy Etcoff It is said that analyzing beauty, or pleasure, destroys it.   Laura Mulvey   Beauty in art is nothing more than ugliness subdued.   Jean Rostard   Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.   Socrates   Beauty and folly are old companions.   Benjamin Franklin   Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.   Ralph Waldo Emerson   As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.   Ralph Waldo Emerson   The perception of beauty is a moral test.   Henry David Thoreau   Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.   Pablo Picasso   I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men.   Albrecht Durer   Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.  Gustave Courbet    I’m still figuring out why people would want to look at me. Maybe it’s generic beauty, but it’s weird to be valued for something I was born with.   Josie Maran   Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.   Charles Baudelaire   Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.   Nikos Kazantzakis   Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.   Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel   Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.   Serge Gainsbourg     In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.   Phil Ochs   Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.   Jean Rostand    People see you as an object, not as a person, and they project a set of expectations onto you. People who don’t have it think beauty is a blessing, but actually it sets you apart.    Candice Bergen   All the freaky people make the beauty of the world.    Michael Franti   The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.   Gustave Courbet   When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.   Agnes Martin.  I’ve developed into quite a swan. I’m one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older – until I drop dead of beauty.  Rufus Wainwright   The pain passes, but the beauty remains.   Auguste Renoir   Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.   Christian Dior   Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.  Confucius   Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.   Albert Camus  Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.   David Hume   Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.   John Ruskin   Look at me–a big old black man under all of this makeup, and if I can look beautiful, so can you.   RuPaul   The ugliest thing in the world is a beautiful woman without the brains or courage to know that [beauty] is nothing more than an accident.   Charlie Fletcher   Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.   Charles Baudelaire   Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.   Germaine Greer   The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.   Naomi Wolf   A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.   Karl Kraus   Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.   Oscar Wilde   Crippled things are always more beautiful. It’s the flaw that brings out beauty.   Holly Black   In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.  Immanuel Kant