Mattress Beauties

Anna Kell continues to unearth connections between material culture, mass-production, and our limited definitions of gender. Working from her collection of vintage mattress advertisements, Kell incorporates life-sized drawings of idealized female figures from the ads into bed-sized collages made from reclaimed mattress fabric and other related textiles. The works, which stitch together the mass-produced and the hand-made, intentionally blur figure and ground, giving form to the artist’s critique of essentialization.