“This is for You” is a photographic series and sculpture that offers models of aesthetics that depicts togetherness and empowerment of women in terms of the ideal tie between deconstructing idealized feminine and the exploration of female identity. I’m combining photography and sculpture with feminist ideology/theory interwoven throughout.

 

Both my subjects and objects are my sister, my mother, my aunt and myself. I took interest in this topic because being a female myself and having very close relationships with my younger sister, my mother, and my aunt, I know that different body types and faces have different experiences and they lead to different interpretations and responses to my artworks. I focus on the imperfection and how these women negotiate with their bodies and their processes.

 

Instead of having friends as models I find these complexities of having my family as subjects and objects much more interesting and impactful relating from sister to mother to niece to aunt, capturing their reactions and them at myself through their eyes, visually creates a quality state of intimacy and togetherness of women.

With me performing the entire casting process of faces of the women in my family including myself is just so that the idea of the body itself becomes part of the work. The latex masks were meant to be represented in the photographs but in the end, I realized that it is more suited to be presented on its own as physical sculptures on an ironing board as the pedestal. I picked the ironing board because the object in relation to the topic carries it’s own internalized image of feminity, domesticity etcetera and it could be reimagined by the viewers from the way I play with the objects/materials: latex on metal. I try to build a filmic quality to my images, giving it an element perpetuated in a cinematic way. The body of work concedes the possibility of sophistication, subtlety, subjectivity, and performativity.

 

Below is the process of the live plaster casting process and the earlier stages of the project, which was on grotesque feminine and subverting the male gaze.