Meet the Invulnerable Woman - no matter what the abuse, she'll take it! Spin the Baby Wheel of Fortune to find out how your life is determined by your reproductive cycle! Visit the Torture Museum and adjoining Beauty Shop to share recipes of domestication! Or have your future told by The Alien Fortune Teller, who might suggest you solve your troubles by going to live on her planet, "where everyone is truly equal."

While the Sideshow duplicates an appealing carnival atmosphere, it has also received critical recognition as an art installation that playfully questions the way femininity has been constructed in Western culture over the last century. As The Sideshow explores social constraints. simulations of the feminine and power relationships, it also pokes fun at the institution of the Museum and its complicity in the exploitation of people for the sake of art. Other underlying issues are about the violence that lurks behind facades and how fate and chance affect our lives.

Since the 1830's, when P.T. Barnum first acquired the five-story American Museum and began traveling the world to find the most spectacular human oddities, the idea of the "freak show" has been oddly conjoined with the enterprise of the museum. However overshadowed by the ubiquity of televised spectacle, the carnival and the museum nevertheless still hold an interest for the American psyche. As a re-staging of both the carnival and the museological display, Joseph's Sideshow is no less popular, having drawn record-breaking audiences at all of its venues to date.

Joseph's work has been described as "well-executed, powerful, and edgy, ... combining large-scale work with intricate detail" by The Colorado Council of the Arts, who awarded her a Fellowship in 2001. The Sideshow has also been picked as a "favorite" exhibition by art writers in New Mexico, Colorado and the Midwest for being "funky," "freaky," and "fascinating."

The Sideshow of the Absurd opened at The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado in January 2001 and has since traveled to The Bachman Gallery at The Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Munster, Indiana as well as the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico Art Museums.

Future venues include The McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Texas (September 14 - October 20, 2002) and the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida (February 28 - May 4, 2003).

More information: pamelajoseph.com