What / How / Why - November 30, 2016

In my current work I'm collecting images from the internet showing beauty queens in their crowning moment. I concentrate on the moment where their faces seem to loose control over their prettiness and start distorting. I cut out the context of the beauty contest by zooming into the faces and getting rid of obvious signifiers such as earrings. What is left are images with obvious artifacts depicting faces of women who you can still identify as American expressing ecstatic emotions.

I aim on presenting the images in larger than life-sized, color, full-bleed mounted on something heavy leaning against the wall so you can see many of them at once, ideally being surrounded by them.

Taking away the context of the beauty contest and the obvious signifiers the depicted emotions are reinterpreted and become ambiguous. Euphoria turns into horror. For me the images are a comment on current political developments with Trump becoming the American president. It seems like these women foreshadow something dark about to happen. In the images I also feel as if these women have an unspoken knowledge of their own situation being trapped in an authoritarian system. I've always felt like a political person but I never dared to do political work for I always feel like I don't know enough about it. I like that this work gives me the room to express a political statement in a very subtle way without being intentionally political. The work touches many aspects of interest to me: the performance of gender, the institutionalized misogyny, the commodification of beauty and the absurdity of politics. The images speak for themselves and just ask for room and placement.

The relation to my essay about queer strategies in art still needs to be determined. Weiblichkeit als Maskerade