PLUS, Crown Plaza, Ventura Oct 7, 2017
Many self-help books tout the idea of loving yourself before you can love someone else. What does that even mean when you look in the mirror and cringe at what you see? As an artist, I have always looked to art history for answers—the beautiful curvy women of Rubens, the gorgeous luscious bodies of Jenny Saville and Lucian Freud, the distorted compelling faces of Ana Mendieta and Cindy Sherman, looking at the "other" through the eyes of Diane Arbus. I look at these figures and see beauty, bravery, and confidence.
I have an eating disorder. It is prevalent in my art—I often photograph food as a way of confronting these issues. By accident, I started taking nude photographs of myself to confront my own body image struggles. This series emerged one fall morning in a hotel room after watching the sunrise, forgetting to turn off the bathroom light.
This particular hotel had a sliding bathroom door with frosted glass. I had wondered why a bathroom—a space meant for privacy—would need a door that blurs boundaries and offers glimpses into someone's most intimate space. But we are in a hotel room, where privacy and performance intersect.
There was an ethereal glow behind the frosted door. I saw possibilities. On the outside, I am shy and reserved about my sexuality. I wear this armor of fat that holds me back, keeps me contained. But when I started shooting these photos—on timer, on blast—I felt free. I was having fun.
Even with glass between my body and camera, I was playing with the idea that my body could do anything. Yes, it is curvy and round, but it was much more. It was pliable, changeable, creating brilliant silhouettes focused on form, line, and shape. It wasn't my ugly body anymore—it was a beautiful instrument of creation. Not creating life, but creating beauty.
The frosted glass becomes both barrier and revelation, concealing while displaying, offering protection while demanding visibility. Each photograph captures a moment of negotiation between shame and celebration, between hiding and declaring presence. The hotel room—a space of temporary inhabitation—becomes the perfect stage for this exploration of temporary identity, where I could experiment with being seen without permanent consequences.
This work is about confrontation, weight, shape, excess, history, voyeurism, objectification, control, confinement, containment, self-esteem, confidence, bravery, revealing and concealing, authenticity. It joins a lineage of feminist artists who have reclaimed the gaze by turning it on themselves, transforming vulnerability into power through the radical act of self-documentation.
