The other who lives within us/ everyday performance:
Alternative realities for understanding ourselves
The other-ness, usually we relate it to something that is outside of us; something that we are not. It is a big topic within gender, identity studies, and in art. We find it in artists like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, who I find very close to my research.
In the work I present in my last project, "the other" is someone who lives inside us, which might seem real to others, and even to ourselves, but in fact is just the public projection of the construction of our own identity. In other words it's a façade, a conscious or unconscious every day performance we put up to fit into the world.
The way we behave in public, how we dress, even whom and what we desire is all a construction based on a series of social laws and references, imposed by social institutions and structures such as: Family, Church, schools, friends, publicity and fashion. In "The other who lives within us" public space becomes a stage and the subjects become performers. The inner fantasies of each character are displayed on public space and therefore, becoming intimate, leaving all the social laws and structures that participate in this construction, suspended.
I don't want to shock or tell the spectator who he is. I want to establish a dialogue that allows me to expose to him these laws and structures as a montage. The work invites the spectator to question the truthfulness of his/her identity. An identity that seems natural when it fits into the social structure, or in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, makes it legible, and if it remains outside the norms makes it illegible.
The identities presented in this project found themselves between an uncertain legibility and an innocuous intelligibility. They are incrusted in an accepted representation and social structure, such as public space, ancient painting, and fashion. I consider Painting to constitute, through art history, the medium by antonomasia, of representation of ontological social structures through which identity is constructed.
This justifies the using of pictorial aesthetics in my work. One of the main purposes in my work is to question the interaction between the spectator and the images. Specifically how the representation of a topic can be shocking or acceptable, depending of the medium used. In my oeuvre the medium is photography "disguised" as painting. Hal Foster has called this disguise the screen . Representational Painting aesthetics work as a screen between the spectator and the reality represented by the artist. And also it's a less shocking way to confront him with his own reality. The images pose themselves as the other who lives within us, recognized in order to establish a dialogue with each person.
These images constitute a multidisciplinary project that allows me to be a make-up artist, director, photographer and digital manipulator. But most important, it allows me to help the spectator to redefine the way he looks at his identity, the other who lives within us.