How You Made Us

As women in this society, we are continuously saturated with the idea that our only value is in our attractiveness. In a world dominated by social media, appearance’s value is publicly quantified through likes, shares, and comments. This message is so constant that it becomes an individual’s internalized truth; the outward cultural gaze invades the minds of women undetected and becomes so ingrained within them that its foreignness is unrecognizable. In society's objectification of us, we have come to view ourselves as objects too. We participate in the act of self-objectification every morning by the mere act of getting ready. We spend money, time, and energy choosing outfits, putting on makeup, primping and preening day after day, minute after minute. In collaboration with my childhood friend and fellow artist, Sunday Holland we embarked on a multimedia performance piece to explore this reality.

The performance took place in two parts. By live-streaming our routines of getting ready every morning for a week on Instagram, How You Made Us discovers just how time-consuming and performative the act can be. Having an audience watch as we put ourselves “together” was an act of societal and self-commodification, where viewers participated by being voyeurs and assuming that these live streams were real, rather than a performance. We printed out screenshots of these live streams and asked members of the public to participate in further making our bodies into an object by using the getting-ready stills to cover me in paper mache. We witnessed each other grow from children into women, and this project marks the intense changes and societal norms that come with metamorphosis into womanhood.