Avatars (2015)

Avatars explores performance and objects as projections of power and desire. The video uses a vocabulary of circus or sideshow performance. It is prolonged and uncomfortable examination of the inhibited female body. The video is paired with garments, ceramic vessels, and masks forms. The work speaks notions of sexualized performance through the use of the nude or restrained female body.

The fabric suit references a hospital gown and is quilted with the pattern for the towers of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, reflecting its utopian values of organized logic and functionality. This intellectual restraint is in conflict with the physical realties of the body. White in this work is a symbol of control and purity, as a symbolic color historically used by oppressive entities.