Generated User

According to the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, the personality is composed of the Real Self and the Ideal Self.¹ Your Real Self is who you are, while your Ideal Self is the person you think you should be. The Ideal Self is an idealized version of yourself created out of what you have learned from your life experiences, the demands of society, and what you admire in your role models.

Self-awareness is deeply built into my process, so thinking about the gaze of another, and its influence on our subjectivity, comes from my own lived experience. An experience where I often perform in order to fulfill a perceived role. Performance however, can result in the loss of ownership over our attributes; our projected self gives form to our projection and our attributes begin to possess us.

Over time, this co-existence blurs the distinction between what is real and what is ideal, resulting in that which is projected, becoming that which projects. A new ideal self is constructed in the form of an Avatar, a performative reflection of ourself that we now direct and watch, but who watches us in return.

Generated User, conceptually uses hair to represent the ideal self because hair is culturally complex and powerfully burdened with meanings of how it should be presented. Arguably, hair exists as a malleable symbol of who we are within our culture. Amongst other signifiers and depending on the effort we put into its appearance, hair has the power to define our desirability, our health, and our youthfulness, which are performances demanded of a successful person. Within this artwork wigs are used to represent optimized real hair. The wig was invented to act as a substitute for real hair; to enhance, to cover, to hide, to protect, to augment, and to imitate. Like the Avatar we use to perform for us, the wig is an idealized proxy performing as real.

Understanding that our Real and Ideal selves become part of us, this artwork looks at what happens when our Ideal Self, the one we perform, begins to take on a gaze of its own.