Artist: Ana Esmith
Dates: November 5th to 21st 2020
Performance Calendary
Thursday, November the 5: 18:30 – 20:00 (Opening)
Saturday, November the 7th: 12:30 – 14:00
Saturday, November the 14th: 12:30 14:00
Saturday, November the 21st: 12:30 – 14:00
Miss Beige is a contra-canonical identity, committed to our daily life and far away from the new canons imposed on by the social media. It is a multiform project that was born in response to the lack of female heroines not sexualized or objectified in the collective imagination. This starts with the monochrome use of beige itself, an aseptic colour with which it criticizes the obsession with retouching, filtering and self-deception mechanisms offered by our devices and image applications. Miss Beige begins in 2016 as a project that takes shape through interventions in the urban space. To make her more human, the artist decides to go out on the streets, the public space, par excellence, so that she can interact with the looks and reactions of others. Through them it is questioned whether public space, the streets, has ceased to be public, and whether social media is now a new “public space” wherein the boundary with private fades. She emerges as a 21st-century heroine, without a cape or tight leggings because she knows that her beige dress, belt, shoes and gloves, and a hammer coming out of her purse, can destroy all the vanity that surrounds her. Miss Beige, whom the artist calls the anti-selfie, claims that this woman has been poorly labelled as “average”. This is a woman who is not dependent on men, who does not have to be a mother, who does not respond to present social canons and who, of course, is not a sexual object. The rituals of appearance, the aesthetics of artifice and reflection on gender are part of the conceptual background of her work where she releases the image of femininity understood as cultural construct based on arbitrary conventions, imposed over the centuries. Its total beige look provides a very different image from the one we usually see on our screens. Away from hypersexualization, Miss Beige emphasizes the most common and even boring aspects of our daily life. Miss Beige builds herself through images where she presents herself as a subject and an object, or if she prefers as an artist and a model, an unaltered game within performative practices since the beginning of 20th century.
MICHELANGELO’S MISS BEIGE
The integration of the pedestal into sculpture was an essential step of sculptural modernity. In this way, the use of the pedestal in performance is proposed to turn Miss Beige into a living sculpture to play with “the distance” and its roles. Miss Beige generates a space, a virtual cage equivalent to the frames of a painting. The pedestal modifies the perception of the figure and in turn responds to the new normality we are facing in 2020. The viewer looks at the sculpture and meets Miss Beige’s gaze but, truly, who looks at whom?
Ana Esmith’s performative practice (Madrid, 1976) with Miss Beige takes place both in interventions in urban spaces, as well as in a photographic and video work shown in exhibitions, in the photobook Miss Beige Taking The sTreeTs and largely on her Instagram and Facebook accounts. Since its creation in 2016 Miss Beige has been walking through important national and international fairs and art festivals such as Arco, JustMad, Hybrid, Marte, Desvelarte, White Night of Oviedo, SURGE, Chrom-Art, La Encartada Moda, ArtJaen, the National Theatre (CDN), RIZOMA film festival ,in its edition dedicated to Doppelganger,and a recent appearance on the big screen in the feature film Tristesse. Added to this solo exhibition are the monographic exhibition “Miss Beige a la vista” at the Iskoo Gallery in Galicia, her participation in the II Resistance Cabinet, and five performing installations “La Miss Beige de Michelangelo”(2017); “Maison Beige, the Family Grows” (2018); “In Bed with Miss Beige” (action from which she develops the album Secrets of Alcoba) (2018);” Se Nota, Se siente, el Beige es incluyente” (2019); and “Paseo en Glovo” (2020).
