It’s hard to understand women… It is hard for man as well as for women themselves… It is even harder to understand artists… Thus, to understand a female artist is doubly hard. On top of that, the artist Mariela Gemisheva is a fashion designer… And fashion is about personality expressed through clothing. The premise is that cloths are an adjustment to personality because cloths are masks. There are endless possible variations of personality through clothing. But how to express a personality that is hard to understand to begin with? The personality of a female artist of fashion design who is used to using other people to express her vision and ultimately, personality? The other people are the models in a fashion show. They are adjusting their own personalities in order to reveal the “personality” of the cloths they are presenting to the public and thus are expressing the personality of the artist who has designed the cloths… Here the equation becomes much too complicated.
To make things easier Mariela Gemisheva establishes collaborative partnership with the male gaze, personified in the artist/photographer Danail Shturbanov, in the newest project “Out of Myself”. Theory says that the male gaze is an oppressive instrument of patriarchal signification even when used as a tool for identification through reflection. Here it becomes a constructive instrument for portraiture of a personality that is the process of finding out about herself. The male gaze here is not just reflecting but is constructing the personality of the “model”. Not only that, Mariela has “offered” herself as a model to the male gaze of Danail Shturbanov and the male gaze is willingly imposing itself onto the submissive “model”... The creative interaction of these two partners, a voyeur and an exhibitionist (although one is never quite sure who is whom…), is molding out various characters and personalities that are marking the stages in a process of “going out of myself”. And while the female partner obviously has a hunger for trying out various personalities, the male partner is having a hard time to trigger, follow and ultimately, satisfy the never-ending shifts in the female guises.
When one is trying to understand women, people say, one is reaching the realization that women are multifaceted human beings, constantly shifting between different roles and “personalities”, constantly unsatisfied with who they are, with whatever, whoever and mainly with themselves… The woman, the unsatisfied female artist of fashion design, is wearing her own cloths that are meant for entirely different people, in order to satisfy her wish for clarity and stability of identity. And the drama is that she is failing… She doesn’t seem to be able to make up her mind about what she really is. But neither is able to do so the male gaze of the interacting photographer who is taking obvious pleasure in being “along for the ride” without making any final visual conclusions about the “model”. Is she the tramp, the she-boy, the wicked witch from the fairytales turned young, the femme fatale, the artist as a director, the visionary, the diva, the unmarried “housewife, the vamp, the water (fish) carrier from the history of art with the numberless paintings, the ugly duckling from still other fairytales, the anti-Paris or is she (rather, are they…?) just a player(s) in the game of difference and identity?
She doesn’t know but he doesn’t know either and the creative tension of this reciprocal insecurity has produced a splendidly baroque group of visual works. The video tape documenting the interactive photographing/modeling sessions of “going out of my(your)self” is as much part of the story as are the intricate make-up and hair-dressing interventions. At the end one is left convinced that “Out of Myself” becomes “out of thy-self, your-self, him/her-self” and all possible shades of interaction between the self and the other. It turns out that finding out about oneself is actually a group project, or how many people does Mariela Gemisheva need to find out who she actually is? Maybe all of us…?
Iara Boubnova
Luchezar Boyadjiev
