Rachelle Beaudoin

Only a year after earning her MFA at RISD, Rachelle Beaudoin was making waves in New Hampshire. In 2008, her piece Cheer!Shorts, comprising women’s hot pants with provocative sayings on the rear (e.g., TOTALLY WAXED) and still photos of her wearing the shorts in public, caused a ruckus at a New Hampshire college gallery. There was buzz about warning labels and the need to erect a curtain to protect unsuspecting gallery visitors.

Women are Like That, 2014, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Beaudoin’s home and studio, up a dirt road surrounded by maple-sap lines and nestled deep in the woods of Peterborough, NH, seems an idyllic setting for another artist, one who makes nature-based art perhaps instead of provocative video and performance art. But then there’s the yellow bob-house decked out with fancy trim and pink wallpaper parked outside (which featured in Beaudoin’s month-long performance at Portsmouth’s 3S Artspace).

Inside the house, shared with her forester husband and their 15-month-old son, a desktop computer and a tall Muppet-like dog named Theo are the primary features of Beaudoin’s bright downstairs studio. There are props—fake eyelashes and makeup masks—and sketchbooks full of lists. In preparation for an upcoming residency at the Canterbury Shaker Village, she has been brainstorming lists about utopian communities, a wearable Shaker chair and the division between men’s and women’s work.

Labor is a recent theme for the artist. In her 2019 performance Pushing a Rope at the Currier Museum, Beaudoin moved a massive rope back and forth while reciting a list of chores collected from female friends. (The piece was performed in front of Ethan Murrow’s giant wall mural, Hauling, which depicted a very pregnant Beaudoin pulling a rope.)

“The culture is not calm about pregnancy,” the artist jokes across the kitchen table. In her video False Equivalencies, a seemingly pregnant Beaudoin unties her shirt causing a series of objects to fall from her belly and strike the ground—a watermelon, a basketball, a raw chicken. The piece was inspired by her discovery of pregnancy apps that compare an unborn child to everyday objects; it is Beaudoin’s way of questioning this “infantilizing” approach of imparting information to women.

Welcome to the Bobhouse, 2015, installation, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Beaudoin’s creations are a cross between The Office and Eleanor Antin and Vito Acconci. Her Berlin, NH, roots and love of the outdoors make her work unique alongside contemporary artists exploring feminist issues. What does it mean to be a modern woman living in a rural place? It’s a compelling question occasionally tackled by country music divas but often ignored by the art world.

Beaudoin’s videos and performances deliberately resist polish in favor of awkward authenticity. And this is where her humor lies—to see her pole dancing with a tree in the middle of the woods, leaping across the screen like a deer or boldly pulling giant pastries out of her bra and pants before eating them in front of unsuspecting customers at a coffee shop is to realize how fine the line is between reality and the absurd.

This is especially true of her how-to style videos. Started in 2007, her webisodes anticipated the rise of YouTube stars and lifestyle sites such as goop. But unlike Kim Kardashian, Beaudoin’s how-to persona, Linds, is a blundering anti-star. In one farcical home-spa session, she uses three pieces of exercise equipment at once in an attempt to achieve “maximum hotness” with “maximum efficiency.” In another she shows viewers how to “maximize makeup with masks,” hilariously reducing a Korean 10-step facial process to one. The series pokes fun at the beauty industry and America’s obsession with physical transformations and always taking the easy way out.

Beaudoin has a talent for exposing the absurdities of internet culture. For an August show at Magenta Suite, she created castpaper sculptures and paintings inspired by the popular slime videos. The vaginal forms, which resemble roses made of brightly colored shaving cream, are the result of her fascination with “Slime Queens”—young women who make millions online swirling slime to satisfy the public’s obsession with both DIY and ASMR (the tingling euphoric feeling created by certain stimuli).

Reaction to Beaudoin’s art is telling. YouTube users leave comments such as “Did this actually work?” on Lind’s videos. We live in an era where reality and fantasy are difficult to distinguish. It takes artists like Beaudoin to reveal a difficult truth: Reality really is stranger than fiction. All we can do is laugh together, to keep ourselves from crying.

Michelle Aldredge is a writer, designer and founder of the arts blog Gwarlingo. She has been named a “Top 100 Artist, Innovator, Creative” by Origin magazine. She is also co-author of Mirror Mirrored: A Contemporary Artists’ Edition of 25 Grimms’ Tales.

Rachelle Beaudoin
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