Tracing the concept of the vanitas as its use and meaning change through history — originally referring the futility of earthly presence and possessions and acting as a reminder of our own mortality, as well as the current use of the word vanity, which appears transformed from vice to virtue — my work is increasingly informed by questions of the passage of time and the fluidity of appearance.
In The Mediterranean Diet oil and bread serve as the tools of an invented cleansing ritual that brings the mythologies surrounding food and vanity under examination.
La Vie en Rose frames the female body as a performer, engaged in a physical feat of the breath as she strains to blow out the insides of an egg. Charged with symbolic weight across cultural traditions, here the egg reflects expectations of the female of the body as both producer of life and sexual object. The familiar sounds of the horn in La vie en rose punctuate the action, wryly reframing the gesture somewhere between defecation and sensual pleasure as we move towards the ultimate, satisfying release.
Waxing strips peel away the outer layers of a coconut husk, as if preparing it for some sort of consumption, but also drawing attention to the gesture itself, a humorous and even aggressive action with little to no useful effect. The by-now ubiquitous term “life hack” is called up, positioning the rituals of vanity as ineffective solutions to problems that we did not know we had.
Teresita was created during a workshop at the Salzburg Summer Academy. This piece is was made in response to a text by an author who was writing about a piece of art. Both author and artwork were unknown to me until the completion of the piece. Prompted to create a visual response to this text, I interpreted the author’s words as if they were a set of instructions, applying each descriptive phrase onto my own body. I was initially drawn to the text for its heavily descriptive and overly grandiose language, which spoke of a female figure akin to Mona Lisa, ambiguous, mercurial, sensual, desperate. The author’s tone seemed to revere, flatter, and perhaps even fear the figure. As I make myself up as Teresita, my voice also reads the text aloud. Marking and underlining as I go, my tone becomes at times critical and confused, and at others unconvinced and amused. Within the context of The Image 101, Teresita questions the generally accepted authority within the arts of the text to speak about the image, in which a text is written for or applied to an image, thereby giving the image weight or validity. The video is displayed on a monitor under my original copy of the text (with wrinkles, fingerprints and all), and an excerpt from Gottfried Boehm’s “What is an image”, selected by curator Tina Teufel.
Many thanks to Laura Cassidy Rogers for allowing me to use her text.
anna.m.rose 