Alisa Henriquez​

In these constructed assemblages, I combine material gathered from popular and glamour culture with digitized and magnified images from contemporary media, art history, and autobiographical sources. In reconfiguring and reassembling these materials and images into various cubist-like formations, I aim to explore the multiple histories, various beliefs, and at times contradictory notions of self that emerge.

Within the lozenge shaped wood panels that are stacked and assembled into various cubist-like formations, a host of other materials are also used including paint, resin, glitter, vinyl, rubber, yarn, and synthetic hair and fur. When juxtaposed or layered with photo-based imagery, materials like glitter and paint can function as a violation or gestural defacement of the underlying glamour image. In some works, images and materials that draw from my personal history and art historical representations of women are utilized. Images of Adam and Eve or other mythological figures are often vertically stack in ways that reference Venus of Willendorf. At other times, recurring motifs such as heavily mascaraed eyes, glossed lips, hair, and skin also conjure female fertility, sexuality, and desire, albeit through a different, media inspired lens. The encoded meanings and myths contained within such sources offer me much artistic fodder for examining the abstract dialogue, emblematic importance, and often fractured nature these material and media born identities reveal when positioned in the same space. In their layering and fragmentation as well as their compositional character, I hoped to establish a sense of visual slippage and a breaking of the power of the singular, individual image. The result are works that I hope capture the ongoing internal negotiation with media fragments and societal constructions of identity and beauty. Ultimately, one might even say, the subject of the work becomes not the individual images or their juxtaposition, but the act of looking and the constant figuring and problematizing of our relationship to these sources and the continual state of makeover they represent.