Recent Work: Putting My Face On

This is another incarnation of the red lipstick investigation.  I set up a camera on a tripod in front of me and slowly filled my face with lipstick, using the camera as a mirror.  I was thinking about concepts like "beauty" and "femininity" and "sexuality" and the ways in which those ideas are constructed and performed.  It was also a gestural action that had a lot to do with drawing and painting practices.  I think of it as a really ambivalent self-portrait, because actually, I'm trying to discover who my "self" even is, and what it means to embody a particular "self" in the first place.  What defines me?  What if I use those things that are supposed to define me in a different way?  I'd like to open things up and explore the possibilities within limitations/ impositions--I want to examine the things that make me most uncomfortable to discover why, and if there's a way to change them.

Here's the video.  The high-quality version was too large to upload, so this is a lower-res version, and is therefore not as dazzling as it could be: 

I showed this video, projected onto a wall, for my final post-bacc critique (I was still calling it Face Fill then).  It was recently accepted into a massive group show, Color, at BWAC (Brooklyn Waterfront Artists' Coalition), juried by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, former curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.  The opening is on the 28th, and the show is up through August 19th.  Go see it!  It's installed in a 9.5x12.5" screen, and is somewhat more dazzling than what you see above as a result.  Incidentally, I'm interested to see how a more intimate scale will lend itself to the viewing, compared to the wall projection, which had an imposing effect.  

Here are some progressive stills I put together for the application:

mouth

eyes

full face

And some shots of my face after recording: 

mirror reflection

 

mirror reflection

straight on

I attended the senior thesis show with my face like this as an experiment, before most people knew about the video.  It was fun to see people's reactions.  I had a few friends kiss my face, hoping that their lips would leave negative space marks on my face.  It didn't have that effect, but it did lend them some lipstick for their mouths/ chins/ noses.

 evidence