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Above: Penumbra, front cover.
Penumbra is a 179-page artist book that combines found media and self-portraiture, exploring how the images we consume inform our gazes on ourselves.
Above: Penumbra, detail of image spread.This project began as a personal investigation into my own relationship with my body. Throughout this process, I have been drawn to archival materials – vintage print magazines, family photographs, oral histories, and personal writings – as a way to investigate what I have inherited surrounding my body and identity.
As the project developed, I realized that there were two different archival practices I was undertaking: (1) archival materials of the family; (2) archival materials of the outside world, namely mainstream media.
Using self-portraiture, the book’s images restage advertisements from magazines printed during my grandmother and mother’s coming of age.
For the book’s text, I interviewed women in my family about the relationship between beauty and self-image, superimposing these interviews onto its imagery.
Above: Penumbra, detail of image spread and interview excerpt.
As seen above, the self-portraits remix what my grandmother was exposed to in popular culture, what she passed down to my mother, and what I have absorbed about beauty and femininity across generations and media. The images were then fused together on Photoshop to create those seen in the publication.
In my personal reflections, I considered how isolation in domestic spaces has altered how I see myself and relate to my own femininity, especially in the absence of regular public presentation over the past few years. These reflections, as well as the project itself, are still ongoing, as an archive is amassed over a lifetime or more.
Above: archival imagery of family.
Above: Artist talk presenting Penumbra as well as a series of related projects called The Body as Archive.