ACT NATURALLY

There is perhaps no age that better exemplifies the tension between performance and authenticity than the teenage years. The growing awareness of both one's own self and societal expectations clash as adolescents wrestle to reconcile the two. The security and insecurity, the confidence and self-consciousness, the resilience and the vulnerability, they all exist right below the surface. This beautiful, fragile, fraught time is illustrated with the oxymoron Act Naturally.

EASY LABOR

Women's pain tends to be taken less seriously (and treated less aggressively) than that of men. Childbirth is easily one of the most dramatic events that the human body undergoes. Why is it, then, that we have all somehow agreed that the description "an easy labor" can be applied to any labor that doesn't end in surgery or trauma? There is nothing easy about it. But it is something that only women do. Perhaps that is why it has been easier to write off, linguistically. This project aims to draw attention to the way in which the English-speaking world has semantically downgraded this feat of enormous physical strength, endurance, pain, and risk, by referring to it as easy. There is even a book on Amazon titled 'Easy Labor: Every Woman's Guide to Choosing Less Pain and More Joy During Childbirth'. This, and presumably the oxymoron, too, was the brainchild of a man.