Most of us have been there before: unintentionally finding our parents’ secret stash of playboys. A cringey coming-of-age moment that forces us to consider them as sexual beings which usually results in a hurried attempt to wash our eyes and brains of such thoughts. However, Amy Turner saw this as an artistic opportunity, especially when she discovered in the 2020 pandemic that her wife’s father owned three-hundred of them. While most normal folks would be delighted to see them on their way to the landfill, Turner took them in and began to recognize visual patterns from issue to issue: a formulaic sameness to the centerfolds, the carefully planned poses, hairstyles, and bodies that are iconically PlayBoy. She set off to create new portraiture from the old magazines, recombining them into even more generic bodies that began to look like classical Greek statuary, complete with missing heads and limbs. As she continues to collage new women from old, her collection of PlayBoys also grows, amassing now over 1,800 issues.
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