It's a fire
Collage series by Daniela Melo
In my practice I focus on questions of identity, gender roles and the social female body. A great part of my artwork refers to the discourse of fashion and explores a precise field of its underlying currents such as aestheticized sexuality. I am interested in the relationships between strength and vulnerability, beauty and impermanence and I picture scenes of obsessive desire, exhibitionist acts, narcissistic attitudes, power relations and role play.
My feminist approach to the high fashion imagery is either bitter and lure. I work from photographic images of women’s bodies, and the sexual objectification it portrays. Images that are overexposed and imposed as ideals which I cut free of a context they never entirely reject.
“I picture scenes of obsessive desire, exhibitionist acts, narcissistic attitudes, power relations and role play.”
For this series, named It’s a fire — I used appropriated photos taken from iconic fashion magazines of the 90’s and 2000’s and through collage I enhanced the reduction of women’s bodies to glamorous body parts.
There’s no intention to fix or to repair but the intuition of a thought and the desire to invent new narratives from unplanned arrangements that I juxtaposed and spliced together before reframing them. The poetic approach is central to my practice so I often use words or sentences to set-up connections and to create unsaid dialogues between the work and the viewer.
*It’s a fire, 2020. Collage printed on tracing paper.
"I think you will be tired of telling
me & my dreams to go to hell."
"Unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home."
"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."
"Since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid.”
"Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl…"
"In the street of the sky night walks scattering poems."
"She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still."
*quotes by E.E. Cummings
