chinabird

31 years old

Beijing, China

Female

Vanity in a Room

Vanity in a Room

Ja Sam Magarac explores the underlying narcissism that our culture projects. During the late hours of the night, or more often the early hours of the morning, Magarac started experimenting with her point and shoot camera. While the sun was at two o'clock, she found her own vanity in a room as empty as the bottle on her table.

Her relationship with the camera is one of self-masturbation; she is both the photographer and the model, the lover and the loved, the top and the bottom, simultaneously losing and gaining control as she holds the camera in self-induced fits of ecstasy.

As she repeatedly documents the ever-changing reflections of her face, she is much more than a beautiful woman taking her own picture; she becomes a mirror in which we see our own faces, ghosts in a society where beauty is power, and power is beauty. We get caught in the shimmering, glistening, bronzed surface of her skin, but as we consume one image after another we realize that we have gone under the surface, cutting into something deeper than flesh.

The photographs delve deep inside Magarac's own understanding of self, and into her desire to explore and expose herself. She is offering herself to us, hoping that we might find something more beautiful than humanly possible to find in a face and a body; the light inside the darkest storm.

This little project was inspired from elements of my past and my super villian, "Mystique." The text here is appropriated from the art of an artist who will remain unnamed. "Ja sam Magarac" is an endearing little joke a former boyfriend used to play on me whenever I replied, "Yeah" to a question. "Ja" in Serbian means "I" and "sam magarac" means "am an ass." Altogether now, "I am an ass." The artist whose words I've used for this spoof is a successful fashion photographer in New York and has blossomed into a reputable artist. As for this text? Well, we all start off full of ourselves and it's best that we just laugh at the memory.