Maya and Maria Raquel with Pizza No. 2 Print

My work and investigations focus on the female existence within established concepts of beauty. Through a variety of media it discovers, exposes, and challenges aesthetic standards that create familiar archetypes, and presents visual realities that both invite and defy aesthetic expectations. My art records the damage that pervasive beauty canons and limited definitions of these create in a group and in an individual’s perception of body, beauty, and self worth. It documents countervailing declarations of beauty and historical shifts in standards and their subjectivity. It explores a series of visual commonalities-- aesthetic systems within a class, culture, or social structure. In my immersive surveys of communities of different classes of women, I observe the varying definitions of beauty that form collectively and organically, or are passed down inter-generationally despite prevailing global standards.