About

Barely Skin Deep is an interactive online documentary video project, which explores the concept of feminine beauty from the perspective of 10 diverse women. Using video interviews collected over a 4-year period, this documentary work seeks to present a fragmented, pluralistic perspective on the personal and societal issues which influence a woman’s concept of self and group beauty.

About 4 years ago, I sought to uncover a range of personal viewpoints and experiences on this topic by video interviewing women from various ages and cultural backgrounds. At the time, I was unsure how I would use the footage. I approach fine art projects in a fairly organic manner: I collect material and then see what issues are revealed. As a result of seeing the vastly different perspectives presented in the interviews, I decided to create an online interactive work. This enables the viewer to access and evaluate these fragmented interviews in order to formulate his/her own opinion based on the presented materials.

Each interview fragment is 10 to 60 seconds and is retrieved from a database of over 200 clips using the XML language in a Flash interface. One of the key issues discovered as I was working on this project was that different people want to access the material from this database in different ways. As a result, the interview clips can be viewed by either interviewee or by one of 9 topics, where the viewer has the ability to further define the viewing constraints by selecting a specific interview question. In addition to the database clips, the viewer can also access background information on each interviewee in the Women section. Through a Forum section they can also participate in discussions related to the topics covered in the database interviews.

Topics covered are:

Age, beauty, body, breasts, hair (head and body), makeup, sexuality, plastic surgery, and weight.