Art Brussels
Victoria Colmegna
May 28 – June 15, 2020
Victoria Colmegna
She never sees a whispered conversation going on but they are talking about her, to her detriment, 2019
LED lightbox, permanent marker, plexiglass
49 ¼ × 29 ½ inches (125.10 × 74.93 cm)
In her work, Victoria Colmegna (b. 1986) engages with the body language and dynamics that dominate closed systems. She is interested in the rituals, etiquette, and practices that structure and shape dynamics within schools, parties, and ultimately within the body.
First appearing in her exhibition at the LUMA Foundation at Westbau, this series of Lightbox self-portraits critically reflect on the making of the young artist’s oeuvre as a self-abusive practice within her immediate social context. The metal framed boxes resemble the propaganda of NYC 80's performance marquees or Chagall's church vitraux, conceptually casting the artist as a starlet. The text on the lightboxes constructs Colmegna’s imago letter-by-letter with what she describes as a “biotype constitutive beatnik classification poem.” For each work, she invents a medicalized persona, striking and performing a self-radical pose both gesturally, with the symptomatic text, and temperamentally, within the image of the selfie.
By dispersing her own agency within the ideological, psychological, and material fragments that make up her life and work, Colmegna performs an image that is both evasive and existential. “Simple pop structures sustain her image, allowing her real self to remain a mystery – is she really that sexy?” –K.G.
