Celebrity Masks - 2009

Celebrity Mask series celebrates the surreal moment when an actor's mask (her very own face) is replaced with the powerful, animalistic states created by the indigenous mask maker. In the same way that actors use their faces as a mask in order to portray altered personalities and situations, this series points to – and undermines – the mask of femininity and pleasantness that women are expected to wear. Like John Berger’s notion of women watching themselves being watched, I am interested in how being a woman in society is very much like being your own doppelganger. If the physical self mirrors not oneself but how others see you, then my superimposition of the mask enables a different type of fantasy to be evoked while also freeing the starlets from the fans’ gaze.