Reflection Stills from Dressing Room
Video Installation, 2006
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Using double video projection, this installation explores the relationship between self and reflection in the social and psychological site of the dressing room. In our culture, women in particular are held responsible for learning the language of clothing and for developing the related but separate skills of shopping and dressing. Everywhere we go, our female bodies are regularly surveyed as meaningful territory on which social status, personality, and moral character are written. Thus the capacity to project the way in which we wish to be received indicates mastery over our appearance and provides a sense of power within a system over which we have little control. Housing many of our hopes and fears, the dressing room then becomes a space in which this quest for power is continually played out through repetitive self-scrutiny. In this private space we evaluate what will be our public appearance, considering ourselves as the objects of others’ gazes, simultaneously looking and being looked at. Making public my self-surveillance, projections show me trying on dresses and looking at myself in an endless loop, pointing to the awkwardness and interminability of our efforts for satisfactory presentation of self. Filmed separately, the two video feeds amplify the distinction between self and appearance and interrupt the viewer’s privileged voyeuristic perspective.