A Strong Female Figure
2016
Object, 22 x 17 cm.
Materials: makeup on facial wipe
Collection: Courtesy Victoria Sin.
Victoria Sin (°1991, Toronto CA) is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often-unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.
Victoria Sin is not your common, or ‘garden’ drag queen. Despite the make-up applied with a trowel, ginormous silicone breastplate and wigs in varying shades of platinum playfully mimicking the sex symbols of the 1940s, there is certainly more than initially meets the eye. Firstly, they were assigned a female gender at birth, but identify as non-binary, taking the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’. Secondly, their performances, whilst a veritable extravaganza in terms of Sin’s bodily aesthetic, focus on seemingly arbitrary acts, where making a sandwich or drinking a glass of milk on stage become wry comments on the labour of performing femininity.
About the make-up wipes: “The make-up wipes I see as artworks, as they are literally prints of my face. It’s a technique I have developed over a few years now and I do it every time I take off my make-up off. There’s a specific way of placing the wipe on the face and pressing and rubbing in a certain way to make a print of my drag make-up. I like to think of them as archives of the feminine labour that was performed that evening. But they also become very performative images in them- selves.”
Victoria Sin works and lives in London, UK.
http://victoriasin.co.uk/
