What would drive you to pack a family of mannequins into your station wagon, and take them on a road trip? Enough pressure to conform will send anyone packing. Conform to what? Well, it was getting late. Seriously late for a woman my age not to have a ring on her finger. People said, "You're such a nice girl, why aren't you married?" No one actually used that out of date word, but, what they were driving at was that I was a "Spinster," and I got tired of hearing about it.

Even my mother must have thought she was setting me straight when she said, "Suzy, there's nobody perfect out there. You just need to PICK somebody, if you're going to settle down." I snapped back, "Mom! It's not like I can go out and BUY a family! I can't just MAKE it happen!" But then, I found a way. I bought a beautiful family... of mannequins. I decided to start a photo project out of the "Kodak Moments" I'd capture with my new store-bought family.

My own home was the backdrop for the first images. Over the next decade, scenes of an idyllic home life eventually extended into a series of holiday greetings, as a satirical response to annual family photo cards. However, the project took a turn after taking them on a road trip. I saw the potential in shooting in public. Seeing me work with the mannequins is such a peculiar and funny thing to witness, that people are immediately disarmed. As soon as that happens, their mind is open and impressionable. Using humor, paired with shock, allows my message to penetrate, and the work can have greater impact. The aim is to get people to reconsider their stubborn allegiance to traditional life expectations.

Ozzie and Harriet are dead. So why is this antiquated idea still affecting our image of marriage? It is the reason why this series is named "Life Once Removed." A family relation, a generation apart, is "once removed." So is our relationship with our path in life. It's passed on by the previous generation, once removed from our own. Why do we cling to past tradition as the measure of success in the present?

This is a weird time in women's history. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased as punch that I was born when I was. I have more choices and opportunities than any generation of women before me, but our roles have never been more complicated by deeply ingrained mixed messages, from both previous and present generations. The term "perfect" is no longer used to describe what we're all striving to be. Now it is called, "fulfilled."

But for women, the path to fulfillment is not through one thing, it's through all things: Education, Career, Home, Family, Accomplishment, Enlightenment. If any one of those things is left out, it's often perceived that there's something wrong with your life. We are somehow never enough, just as we are. Even if we do have a finger in each of those pies, there is never enough time to do any of them to our satisfaction. We are constantly set up by our expectations to feel as though we are missing something.

I thought it was high time to call this nonsense out publicly, because this notion of insufficiency is not just about me, nor exclusively about women in regards to marriage. It's about anyone whose life doesn't look the way it "should." Rarely does anyone's life turn out the way it was expected, and if by some miracle it does, what they expected isn't what they thought it was. I'm simply trying to get people to open up their minds, and quit clinging to outdated assumptions of what a successful life looks like. I want people to lighten up on each other, and themselves, and embrace their lives for who it's made them, with or without the Mrs., PhD. or Esq. attached to their name.

Check out my video and scroll through a few of my photos below:

Suzanne Heintz is a performance artist, photographer, writer and satirist. For more information about Suzanne's work, visit www.suzanneheintz.com

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