In Athina Valha’s unit 2 composition class, we were assigned to go to the Welcome Collective, view the exhibit “The Cult of Beauty”, and make a piece about it.

We decided to take videos of every rehearsal that we held, and incorporate that into our final piece.

This is us playing with the idea of me blocking her from looking in the mirror.

We spoke about the idea of perception vs self expression. A mirror is a tricky tool, many people consider using a mirror to be the only way to know how we appear from the perspective of other people.

We also spoke about the difference in societal pressures between men and women.

Here we talk about society's perception of wearing makeup. How it is an extremely common thing amongst women and yet is something that is so unspoken, that many often people will be surrounded by people wearing different amounts of makeup, and think they are the only one.

We decided to use lipstick as an integral part of our piece, symbolizing the things we do to our appearances in the name of self expression.

Oftentimes we find ourselves very reliant on the mirror in many different settings. When we make choices in the name of self expression, what is the effect that we desire? Surely if it were only about expressing yourself, it wouldn’t matter how you are perceived. But it does matter to many of us, it matters more than we’d like to admit.

We applied the lipstick to ourselves and each other, as if trying to conform and being frustrated when we dont look exactly the same. 

Here the lipstick is on India's hand, and when we shake hands it transfers to my hand. We use our palms to smear lipstick across each other faces and shoulders, becoming less rational in our application as the piece goes on.

Our process revolved heavily around conversations, and small improvisations around our conversations. as recording was an integral part of both the process and the final performance, I can't help but wonder if that affected how much we improvised in the studio. We spent a lot of time reflecting on how we both care so much about how we appear, but did we do anything to fix it? what exactly is there to be fixed?