St. Louis Artist, Elizabeth Desrosiers' assemblages and photographs of imagined environments remind the viewer of the playfulness of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and staged photography. In particular, Desrosiers is interested in the process of memory-making and the role of memorabilia in American culture. Similarly, Duchamp appropriated the early 20th-century term “readymade” to describe something that was mass-produced and commercially ubiquitous to the point that it was known to the majority of the population. In both Desrosiers’ and Duchamp’s work, these familiar objects obtain new meaning through titling and conceptual choice.
By using her assemblages to create scenes, almost like a stage director designing sets and backdrops, Desrosiers diverges from Duchamp. These imaginary worlds bring her work into the realm of contemporary photographers like Natalia Arias who design elaborate sets to create photography that has a feeling of magic realism. Both artists are skilled at using naturalistic characters blended with a dreamlike sensibility to craft allegorical observations of the real world. Specifically, both Arias and Desrosiers share in the idea of the doll as an embodiment of the stereotypes that consumer culture propagates. In the doll’s homogenous identity both artists see a kind of blank slate that children's imaginations are uniquely capable of individualizing to push back against mass-production.
