Prime Cuts (1981)

Overview

"For those who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, glamour received its highest expression in fashion magazines like Vogue, where the representation of lives and those who lived them achieved perfection on every page. Prime Cuts is a work premised on the notion that the lives of magazine models are real (much like another Vancouver artist, Ken Lum, who as a child believed that the bedroom suites in the furniture store flyers that landed on his doorstep were real bedrooms). In exploring the lives of models (some of whom the Mainstreeters worked with through commercial projects), Prime Cuts does not so much imagine what these models get up to both before and after the lights, camera and action of the photo shoot casts them in amber, but extends the fantasy." – Allison Collins & Michael Turner, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982, Satellite Gallery, 2015