Rebel Selves | Dawn Woolley

#Rebel Selves installations (2023-4)

(click on image for slideshow)

Installation of fabric backdrops printed with cut-out arms holding mobile phones and legs in different poses. A figure in a skirt printed with legs and a glittery mask poses against the backdrop

#Rebel Selves explores creative methods that could be used to critique and subvert idealised gender and beauty expectations in selfies and portraiture through ideas of entanglement and camouflage. The installation is something between a stage set for an absurdist play, a hall of mirrors, and an exploded 3-dimensional photograph. Masks, garments and props are scattered around the space, inviting visitors to play different characters. It critiques the norms that are common in selfies and self-portraiture, queering gender and other binaries. Selfies are an important form of self-expression because they enable marginalised people not represented on mainstream media platforms to be visible. Sharing and commenting on selfies creates online communities, enabling self-esteem building

support and validation. However, they are often constrained by binary gender and other beauty ideals. Research shows that bodies that are marginalised experience hostility online. This may prevent them from receiving the benefits of being visible and building communities on social media. Therefore, it is important to find ways to participate online while reducing their potential exposure to negative comments and experiences. #Rebel Selves explores creative methods that could be used when taking selfies to avoid some of these problems. The project comprises the installation, self-portrait photographs, contemporary dance collaborations, participatory workshops, a zine, and a smartphone app.Dazzle is an experimental zine that brings together the findings of #Rebel Selves.

Installations were exhibited in:

Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces Warrington, 3rd October – 23rd November 2024

RupturEXHIBIT, Hampton Wick, 16th – 22nd July 2024

Left Bank Leeds, 10th January – 9th February 2024

Joy and Revolution (2 solo installations) Diskurs Gallery, Berlin, 8th June – 14th July 2023

#Rebel Moves Contemporary Dance Artworks (2024-5)

Rebel Moves is a series of collaborative performance videos created with Jay Yule and Miriam Levy, queer contemporary dancers. In conversation with Woolley the dancers developed interventions that were performed within the #Rebel Selves installation at Left Bank Leeds and RuptureXHIBIT (Hampton Wick) in 2024.

The videos artworks (Glitchies, Jay Yule and Rehearsal, Miriam Levy) and performance documentation (#Rebel Moves, Jay Yule and Glamour, Miriam Levy) are presented on mobile phone and tablet screens attached to specially devised theatre flats from the #Rebel Selves installation.

[Un]becoming (#felt cute won't delete later)

During the most recent (and largest) iteration of the installation at Castlefield Gallery New Art Spaces: Warrington I worked with Miriam Levy to choreograph

a contemporary dance that was performed by Levy,

Jule, Lizzy Tan and Andrea Callaghan. Taking place in the #Rebel Selves installation, the dance plays with notions of gender, gesture and masquerade on social media and in selfie cultures.

The performance is captured by the surveilling gazes of domestic security cameras. The audience of the performance willingly or unwillingly takes the position of the security guard or overseer watching multiple screens resembling a monitor in a security office. Performed within the #Rebel Selves installation, the dancers explore ideas of self-surveillance in relation to gender norms, using glitch and camouflage as methods for disrupting gender stereotypes in selfies. Their glitchy, broken and often comedic selfie poses performed for the unblinking gaze of the cameras, highlight the absurdity of social media cultures that expect people to be ‘selfie-ready from any angle, 24 hours a day’ (L’oreal Invisible Sculpt make-up advert).

#Rebel Self-portraits (2024)

Gendered experiences of visibleness have been the focus of my self-portrait and performance artworks during the last 20 years. This concern has become more pressing with the rise of social networking sites and smart phones with cameras, both of which have contributed to the popularity and pervasiveness of self-portraiture in recent years. The project directly engages with the potential issues surrounding, and creative possibilities of, queer self-representation. Visibleness can be experienced as positive or shaming depending on the individual’s social status and the type of body they possess. People who are white, able-bodied, middle-class, heterosexual, and slender are likely to be visible for praise but invisible to negative scrutiny. Marginalised people tend to be visible for criticism and overlooked in terms of their needs, desires, and values. Bodies that transgress body norms are subjected to oppressive and disempowering extremes of visibility: they are hyper(in)visible. This has a disciplining effect, because individuals try to conform to body ideals in order to escape hyper(in)visibility. In relation to self-representational art by trans artists, Nicole Erin Morse writes that ‘visibility involves seeking recognition from those in power’ and demands an effort towards

invisibility through assimilation to the norms. To counter this, #Rebel Selves plays with notions of parade and display, creating a type of camp camouflage that enables people to be visible in a manner of their choosing. It aims to queer the notion of the self-portrait, instead creating entangled selfies that blend body, space and pattern in a shifting, glitchy and fabulous apparition.

The #Rebel Self-portrait series were created in the #Rebel Selves installation wearing the costumes made to enable the wearer to negotiate and play with their level of visibleness. The self-portraits respond to an advert for L’Oreal Infallible Sculpt makeup (https://youtu.be/pxX_zzRFeh0) featuring Barbara Palvin wearing a belt of selfie-sticks and mobile phones photographing her from all angles. Palvin says ‘I may not be infallible, but I’m always selfie ready’ and a voiceover tells the audience that they can be ‘selfie ready from any angle, 24 hours a day’. My costume and installation do not place me in the centre of a disciplining gaze of cameras, but visually entangle me in the installation – a glitchy apparition that is hard to pin down.