Martha Wilson

After seeing exhibitions of Martha Wilson I was intrigued by all of her ideas and concepts that she conveyed through performance & photography as well as combining the two medias.  One particular piece that stood out to me was at the Portrait Society where she made a film of herself applying makeup to her face, making her appear older as she assumed she would look around the age of 30-35.  The after effect and final conclusion was a photograph taken years later when she came of the age that she was attempting to forecast within the video.

The video itself remind me of common youtube videos posted by frequent females attempting to show their various styles of applying makeup to make your eyes look larger, or just to make yourself appear more beautiful than you actually are.  So it was also interesting in the aspect that she attempts to make herself appear uglier than she actually is at a young age, doing the opposite move that most people do today.  It was also interesting that she made this video when she did and how it existed years before people even began attempting to share their tutorials online everyday through the internet and youtube.

Her work deals with the idea of image obviously and became this experiment in a way of testing what we think vs. what actually ends up happening. Sort of like a time capsule, preserving her old image throughout time vs. trying to stay and appear young forever. Isn't this what most people want?

I would love to have more of her work explained by her, because in all honesty I couldn't conjure up a decent reply in class to my thoughts. She does these series of experiments with before and after effects in pictures throughout her other work as well and honestly the time in between pictures that she would display is what interested me the most. Yet there is not always evidence of what occurred between photos.