WHAT DOES VISIBILITY LOOK LIKE?
So today I was apart of two online seminars from visiting artists, one of which being Haley Morris Cafiero, a contemporary artist deemed to be a strong provocator and performance based photographer. She explained her main body of work began when she found she couldn’t fit into a public restroom due to her weight, which ended up sparking a range of projects all focusing on the visibility of women and tackles the theme of obesity and how it affects ones everyday life.
Her project ‘Wait Watchers’ considered thought and body change as a form of preformative piece, in that she travelled to many different countries in order to perform mundane acts in public and capture the observers’ reaction.
These places included Barcelona, Prague, LA and Memphis, and she found that each place had different reactions from people which hinted at changes in culture and approaches to different body types. After the publishing of this project, she received a lot of backlash from multiple articles and individuals- and decided to respond to this in a very clever manner.
In this, she took the profile photos of those who had made offensive comments and created pieces where she’d dressed herself up as them, and put the words comments they had made into the piece. This project was titled “The Bully’s Pulpit” and very quickly captured the attention of many people across the world!
During COVID-19, she wanted to continue a project that would’ve taken place in June, where she would paint herself into urban landscapes in Luton, through physically painting landscapes onto big pieces and then adding them onto screen grabs of the place on Google Maps. This wasn’t at all the original plan, however this was a good compromise giving the current situation.
This talk definitely grabbed my attention as I felt it was so important to see how a now popular contemporary photography had dealt with negative, offensive feedback in a constructive and creative manner, as I feel this isn’t something you often see. Her vulnerability and openness towards such a personal topic was super inspiring and I feel more equipped to potentially deal with future backlash, should it ever be the case.
V E E L I S E K 