the body is a menace — mixed-media installation

When your body feels like a threat, who do you turn to? Where do you go? How do you cope?

The Body is a Menace is my two-part experimental work reflecting on my fraught relationship with my body under the pressure of oppressive and often unattainable beauty standards.

It considers how “excellence” is constructed as something women are expected to embody, yet are continually positioned to fail at achieving. Within this system, failure is not neutral. It is met with scrutiny, hostility, and exclusion toward bodies that do not conform.

The work articulates an ongoing conflict through black-and-white self-portraiture presented in a single-channel audio-visual installation, alongside an artist book enclosed within a mannequin.

These images depict my a lifelong struggle with my body image that began in childhood. The mannequin becomes both container and cage, framing the body as objectified and constrained by external expectations.

When your body feels like a threat, who else carries that same weight? Where do those experiences converge, and how do we make them visible to one another?

The body is a menace, but I persist, we persist.