Conceptual Overview
This piece, Poolside Gossip: X-Ray, doesn’t just contrast with Poolside Gossip — it exposes what lies beneath it. Aarons’ image sold a fantasy: the perfect pool, the perfect people, the perfect life. It became part of the visual language that shaped how we see success and happiness — affluent, aspirational, beautifully lit.
But in this work, I’m not offering a parody or a reenactment. I’m offering a kind of visual x-ray. Like the protagonist in They Live, this image invites us to put on the metaphorical glasses — to see what was always there, beneath the gloss.
The scene is similar — a pool, palm trees, figures in repose — but the illusion is gone. The water is stagnant, the setting overgrown, the people replaced with damaged fibreglass mannequins propped on crutches. There is no laughter, no conversation, no vitality. These figures were never alive. They’re not failed humans — they’re the bones of the ideal.
This isn’t the aftermath of aspiration. It’s the moment we realise the aspiration was a fiction to begin with. The glamour was a script — and we’ve exited the stage. The mannequins don’t mourn the loss of the ideal. They reveal its emptiness.
Material and Visual Strategy
This work was constructed as a digital photomontage using composited imagery. The pool is real and located in an abandoned or neglected setting, selected for its clear visual contrast with Aarons’ iconic luxury pools.
The mannequins are fibreglass forms retrieved from retail, posed with the aid of hospital crutches—objects associated with injury and dependence. This pairing introduces both irony and pathos. While Aarons’ figures recline in ease, mine must lean for support.
The hyperreal style is intentional: the image sits between fiction and documentation, visually seductive but conceptually uneasy. The composition references the staging of Aarons’ original photographs, echoing but deforming their aesthetic logic.
Symbolic elements include:
- Mannequins – Idealised forms, now lifeless and damaged
- Crutches – Devices of support and failure, disrupting grace
- Derelict pool – A monument to the failure of the leisure ideal
Reflection
This piece helped me clarify a critical throughline in my practice: not just a critique of consumerism, but a mourning of what it promised.
I see this work not as a parody of Slim Aarons, but as a dialogue with him. His world depicted an aspirational fantasy that shaped generations. My work explores what happens when that fantasy ends—when the products are gone, and the identities they sold us begin to dissolve.
The mannequins here don’t just represent broken ideals—they are figures attempting to perform roles that have collapsed. They are beautiful, blank, and ghostly. In that sense, Poolside Gossip: X-Ray becomes both a visual homage and a speculative obituary.
This piece also reinforces for me the potential of digital montage as a way to build speculative fictions grounded in critical observation. It pushes me to explore further how humour, unease, and symbolism can intersect in the visual staging of ideology.
