Look, See: Maia Horta’s Little Acts of Voyeurism Maia Horta posts selfies on Facebook. There’s nothing unusual about that, except for the fact that in her selfies, Maia doesn’t project her ‘best’ (most photogenic) face; does not perform the most glamorous, popular ‘self’ that is so often implicit in the trope of the ‘selfie.’ Rather, we see an array of invented personas that, whether photographed or painted, are charged with painterly conventions. But equally striking is the fact that in Maia’s staging of self, facial hair plays a big part: beards, moustaches, lashes that rim the lips in provocative simulacrum of vulvas. And if this were not enough to make one think of the morphological analogies between faces and genitals, Maia often underlines that upper orifice by stuffing something into it (banana, cigarette), or sticking something out of it (bubble gum, tongue.) Not so much an allusion to oral sex, it is as if the whole act of coitus were shamelessly performed upon another bodily stage. These preoccupations with the visible markers of gender identity – with the making visible of polymorphous gender identity – are rehearsed and reiterated in Maia’s paintings, which concern themselves with the relationship between looking at art and looking at bodies, and in particular, looking at naked female bodies. Of course in this, she partakes of a powerful lineage of feminist artists. Since the late 1960s, makers of art in this lineage have explored the metaphors that are issued by the naked female form, and the particular evasions (from fig-leaf, through coy hand or drapery, to depilation, literally shaving away the evidence of messy under-parts) surrounding female genitalia. The relationship between the vagina and disgust – a relationship that is implicit in so much visual culture – has always been at the heart of these critical works. In Maia Horta’s production of works outside of the studio, whether collaboratively or in the social media, there is an impish, derisory wish to explode and undermine not only gendered expectations and viewing conventions, but also the market conditions that facilitate and sponsor these positions. But, significantly, in her studio practice, the artist remains faithful to the traditional medium of painting in order to probe the structures – at once spectatorial and commercial – that sustain the value of painting in the marketplace. Ruth Rosengarten 2014
