In this, her first book, Ilona Szwarc is dissecting the process of becoming: how an individual assimilates and makes oneself imperceptible in society while engaging a series of internal and external transformations.
Each part of the triptych, consisting of 23 sequential portraits, takes the form of stage makeup tutorials. By employing look-alikes, women who share her general appearance, the artist is placing herself at once as the subject and the object in the photographs. In this step-by-step process she is manipulating her own image through a proxy: her American doppelganger. “As a foreigner to the United States, I stand outside the dominant order while immersed in my own process of becoming. This position, unique in that it is my own, and communal in that it is a space I share with so many others, is the source of my interrogation”, says Szwarc.
These carefully staged photographs confuse the relationship between a portrait or a self-portrait. Szwarc is directing a compelling narrative, in which through cinematic closeups of her painting and drawing on the model’s face, she first creates an uncanny portrait of an aged woman, then through abstract and colorful mark-making she transforms her into a large woman. The series culminates with an androgynous, grotesque, saintly mask, a contemporary Vera Icon of her doppelganger.
“This process of becoming can appear obscure and haunting, the gestures violent and aggressive, a primitive act of mark-making. Through my experiments, I have found that becoming is a process of elimination, a construction that moves progressively towards a void, an erasure of meaning. At first, I would observe myself in the eyes of the double, an act of mimicry that mirrored myself back to me, all the intricate details of how I embody and occupy myself. Now, I imagine myself in a space of emptiness.”