Mirror Images
Clarissa Pezone
Area: Ceramics
Clarissa Pezone
Thesis Statement
This body of work consists of life-size installations that incorporate figurative sculptures and found objects in scenes that are centered in private space and moments. These scenes highlight the isolation of these moments and the boundary between the viewer and the private space they are surveying. I use repeated self-portraiture as a way to explore the border between the real and the artificial, and the self and other. These body doubles are exploring the mythology of self, and the ability of iconography to encompass the unheroic. This work demonstrates the complexity of navigating the uncontrolled and unpredictable nature of reality, and the complicated ways that we relate to ourselves. Based in autobiographical narrative, these scenes are woman-centric and about complex inner dialogues, performance, masquerade, doubt and reflection.
I am using props and found objects in my work and am interested in creating narrative scenes that contain various levels of reality or mysticism. This work orbits around personal dilemmas of mortality, loss, and the isolation of prolonged grief. These sculptures are a place for not only the creation of talismans or objects of power within magical thinking, but also a way to recreate my experiences of guilt, fear and longing . Using this repeated doppelgänger, I am representing a more holistic view of the range of emotions that are often denied in representations of women in figurative sculpture, iconography and mass media.