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About this series
Throughout history, women and their image have been stereotyped. Although in the last decades many changes in our thinking have occurred, somehow, society still holds stringent ideas of what constitutes the perfect female image. When a modern woman looks in the mirror, she perceives any deviance from those ideas as a flaw. The pursuit of perfection has made us reluctant to accept the true nature of our bodies. Any imperfections go against the social ideal and therefore must be hidden. The preconceived ideas of how the female body is supposed to look create a veil that blocks us from true appreciation of the inherent beauty of the body.
‛I am constantly asking myself why I consider ‛this and that’ beautiful, sexy, or feminine and how the male gaze has influenced these concepts or beliefs,’ explains Karen Navarro to DRAWLIGHTS.
In these photographs, light and transparency discretely conceal the ‘imperfections’ from our gaze and present the body in a way that its qualities are shown with a dose of shyness. The distrust of the natural beauty of one’s body is thus disclosed in this project, making a statement about the slow progress of modern society in the acceptance of the female body as nature intended it to be.
Artist Bio
Internationally exhibited multimedia artist, Karen Navarro uses photography, collage, and sculpture to explore the questions of identity and self-representation. Her constructed portraits are known for pushing the boundaries of traditional photography and the use of color. Navarro has won numerous awards and grants for her mixed-media photography, among them the Artadia Fellowship, the Top Ten Lensculture Critics' Choice Award, and the HCP Beth Block Honoraria, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Photo London Emerging Photographer of the Year Award and The Royal Photographic Society, IPE 163. Navarro was born in Argentina but she currently works and lives in Houston, TX.
Photographer: Karen Navarro
Instagram: @karennavarroph
Twitter: @karennavarroph
Foundation: The Constructed Self
Photos copyright Karen Navarro
Supported by Jenny Metaverse.
The Jenny collection contains almost 200 works of modern and contemporary art.
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse, RawDAO and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.