About This Piece

We're taught to believe happy women are beautiful — or that beautiful women are happy. The two ideas blur until they seem like one, both feeding our endless pursuit of joy. And yet real happiness is brief: it flares like a flash of sunlight and is gone, leaving only the memory. Still we dream of it as if it could last.

In this collage I gathered women from art, fashion, and advertising — the radiant, perfected, perpetually smiling kind — and crowded them into a circle. Their smiles overlap, their joy multiplies, and at first it reads as pure celebration.

Look again, and the circle closes. They seem bound together, repeating their roles, performing happiness as an endless ritual. So who drew this circle — society, or the women themselves?

Like the Mona Lisa's smile, it won't resolve. A celebration and a prison at once.

A mixed-media collage. Signed.

Jolanta