Bess Barkholt

In my current work, 'Virginia Supreme - The Documentary (The Room Was Like My Face), I explore the documentary format, investigating a framing of myself as a person, artist/ musician (BESS) through the lens of Virginia Supreme, who's performing and playing with gender performances and identity-expressions. The film contains images surrounding the process of making the not-yet-released album, 'Virginia Supreme' : this film debuting parts of the finished musical work. The film shows vulnerability and curiosity, during a process of research on my own presence as a performer and artist, the questions around gender that comes into play in creating my own image as a professional artist. The main narrator, being me, taking control over my own image, by conducting and co-conducting with a friend, the gaze, watching me/ Virginia Supreme go through these personal processes, and performing herself, while the capitalist society's pressures echoes into, and structures the existence of the life the film unfolds, and is unfolding in.

In these self-conducted, images, I/ Virginia Supreme, explores the creation of presentation of myself, investigating self-display through make-up and layering of culturally female attributes and ornamentation, disrupting and shuffling these elements of aesthetics, in the search of where to draw the lines that constitute identity. Proximity to a perfect or precise image. Allowing to breath in space in between, with curiosity of the presence in the process and the actual physical production of the image itself, not fully controlling the outcome.

excerpts from my dissertation-piece, written at the RCA

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Body/ form (VIRGINIA SUPREME) explores the presence of similar-to-body forms, existing in sculpture, 'performing' femininity, with attributes and ornamentation culturally and historically assigned to women. As thereby condensing a western mainstream culturally female expression into eight forms of papier mache.