Jenny's Monsters
Jenny is a lovely 2nd year art student at UC Irvine doing a project with a forensic artist which she couldn’t talk about until I was there. I am, of course, late for our meeting thanks to the rain and SoCal’s inability to drive in it, but luckily someone else is early. On meeting she gives me a one word brief: Monster. I have to describe to Casey the forensic artist what comes into my mind. I’ve seen these artists so many times on TV and it’s amazing to be actually sitting down with one watching them work, I desperately want to ask him to draw one of my friends to see just how good he is, and just how good my powers of description are. Maybe I should change my view of the ‘monster’ to one of them. Bad thought, not a good thought, go away that thought.
Almost immediately the word ‘pedophile’ is in my head, and the idea that it is a woman is always the most horrifying. Myra Hindley and Rose West (okay, not strictly children). I don’t know why she is French, long dark hair, dark eyes, soft face with a gentle smile. Loves working with children as a substitute teacher and they are always snuggling up to her, but she is soon gone, leaving the traumatized wiped clean of innocence. The end result from my description to Casey was just a normal face, of course, later to be realized when meeting a woman who looked freakily like my imagined one. I think I freaked her out to by repeatedly telling her “you look like my pedophile serial killer” in the first hour that I met her for the first time.
A few days later Jenny emails me to finally explain the project. She is going to put the Monster’s faces on pillowcases, on a bed, and play the recordings of us describing them. I had a really unexpected visceral reaction to her saying she'd send me 'my' monster's picture on a pillowcase. My hands went to my face and my heart beat faster! Just the idea of her makes my skin crawl. How weird that she is only from my imagination but because of what she represents she is still someone I never want to see again! I wasn’t sure I was going to go to the private view but now I'm really looking forward to knowing what the emotion she will produce in me during the exhibition will be.
The following month I did just that and of the twelve pillowcases—all at the head of old hospital beds on which you were encouraged to lie down and listen through earphones to the descriptions we gave to the sketch artist—only two of them are of creatures that are not human. All else are human. All else are the real monsters of this world.