The video couldn't upload here so I linked it to my Google Drive.
For this week's performance, I made a video about skin care. Women in the United States mostly use skincare to relax or maintain skin health. But while researching the reasons why women use skincare, I realized many have one thing in common: to maintain a young, beautiful appearance. We talked about in class how women are often sought out for their appearance, and it can be one of the reasons for violence against them. Are we using skincare for ourselves or are we using it because of society’s influence?
This performance art is inspired by Cindy Sherman. She takes an interesting approach to self-portraits, and I wanted to do something similar to that. There was one statement that caught my eye in The Cindy Sherman Effect, “No wonder the work of so many artists parallels Sherman’s, or at least mine similar conceptual veins: role-playing and the nature of identity; sexual and cultural stereotypes; the pressure to conform to the images of perfection promulgated through television, film, and advertising”. Many women do makeup or skincare tutorial videos to make a living for themselves and it’s amazing how much products they buy for it. Skincare products are expensive and can take many steps to complete yet it is highly sought after by young girls. This performance isn’t meant to offend or shame anyone, you still can enjoy doing it but think about why you started in the first place.
I started doing skincare around middle school; my mother helped me make it a habit to do it every day and night. I like how it feels and how I look after weeks of doing it. However, I do wonder what it would be like if my mother did not influence me, would I still do it for the sake of being pretty? Bell Hooks grew up in a farm country isolated from other people to decide whether her parents were telling the truth, “Our sense of gender roles was learned from our parents, from the ways we saw them behave. My brother and I remember our confusion about gender”. Our society puts so much value on our appearance we sometimes forget we are more than that.
When we take pictures to post on a social media platform, some people like to use Photoshop or add a filter to hide features we don’t like about ourselves. In the New York article Ugly Beauty, Cindy Sherman mentioned that women are more than just their looks, “They are gloriously, catastrophically themselves, and we meet them on their own terms — as we so frequently meet each other — in stagy, embarrassing, endearing selfies launched into the world”. When we become concerned about what other people think about us, we attach our self-worth to them. Selfies can be used to make memories, if all we do is use them to make ourselves look attractive then that’s the type of person we will become. Vain, narcissist, insecure, becoming someone we're not.
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