A friend of mine works for a local university in the medical education department. His job is to create, order and operate fake body parts or mannequins on which medical and nursing students to learn.

He invited me one day to his "office", which consisted of an entire floor of a medical building. There were a series of classrooms set up like ER rooms and surgery suites. There were also office work spaces, a 3-D printer and a storage room, full of body parts. In one room, he pulled out a box of vaginas for OB/GYN students to practice assessing the dilation of women in labor. Another room had a mannequin that had "given birth" over 1000 times.

I left with a bag of 9 arms and 1 head which sat, unopened for a month. When I finally dumped the contents on my living room floor, I had an installation fully composed nearly instantly.

The male arms will each be dressed in a different type of shirt sleeve, in such a way that you can identify what kind of man he represents, jock, doctor, business man etc. These arms will be mounted and suspended from a 2" think clear piece of rectangular plexiglass, rimmed with gold leaf. The plexi will be suspended from the ceiling with gold chains.

Underneath the line of hands will be an adult human size photo of me as a child. The hands and photo will only be inches apart all the hands reaching towards the female child. Audio clips of well known men saying patronizing things about women will be coming out of speaker nearby.

This will be a stand alone piece but will be expanded into the entryway of my thesis installation. The beginning of which will consist of a 20' long narrow hallway with man hands, maybe 100? hanging from the ceiling. The hallway is painted black. Many voices will be heard overlapping each other, some well known, others will be men reading/acting words women have reported that men have said to them.

The beginning of the installation will be the introduction, how things are now and have been - presented in a way that men can feel and experience what women feel and experience daily. The piece will eventually transition into a more positive image of what powerful women look like.

After that, there needs to be a section that is calm and quiet. Maybe that would be the room with just the mouths and if you walk through, you can put your ear up to some of them and hear a woman's voice saying how all those "man words" from the hallway made her feel or affected her everyday life. Not all mouths will have a speaker, but every couple feet will have one. Maybe it's also a short hallway you can walk through (5' long?).

Maybe a section where people can sit down and write - man questions - "What words have you spoken to a woman that you wish you could take back?" Women questions "What words have you always wanted to say to a man but were too afraid to?". These notecards can be tacked up to a bulletin board.

Then a room/hallway with just ears where people can whisper things into. Perhaps the words they just wrote on the paper. A place for men to apologize, if they need to, and a place for women to tell secrets that they've been afraid to share.

I will allow for transformation with this piece. I will somehow have a space for ways the change could happen. Maybe interview kids and ask them about ways to keep equity between genders, since inequity is learned, not innate.

At the end there will be a large table (ode to The Dinner Party) at which women will be given a seat. Large bronze sculptures of female hands will be holding oversized BW portraits of women in powerful poses and each seat, like giant place cards.