By: Keira D. Dooley
August 2003

A Project Report, presented to the Department of Art, California State University, Long Beach
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts

Abstract

Exploring areas of modern eroticism, the project Pedalphilia is a series of mixed media artworks that ranges from witty and subtle to raunchy and in your face. Manipulating the technology of the bicycle with the incorporation of erotic devices, I attempt to dismantle traditional sexual taboos and clue audiences into the fact that women can be just as sexually lascivious as men. Straddling the tenuous line of art and pornography, these fine art “products” from my fictitious company Merry Saddles™ include a variety of items from nineteenth-century advertisement-style lithographic prints and hand bound erotic artist books to “bedroom bicycles” individually adorned with fanciful costumes and assorted erotic attachments. Presented in a fine art showroom atmosphere, Pedalphilia adapted a seductive and liberating context, questioning ideas of perversion and the social construction of hysteria along gender-defined divisions.