Shoshanna Weinberger

My studio practice is rooted in an exploration of my Caribbean-American background. The work explores the complexity of heritage and the psychology of peripheral identity referenced from personal memories, history, research, literature and cultural beauty norms. I consider myself a visual anthropologist, cataloguing and surveying these experiences. 

Whether I was aware of it or not, otherness has been at the center of my consciousness. My early ideals of beauty were shaped by and linked through paintings throughout art history and photographs in fashion magazines. Those images were heroic and beautiful, images that embodied a particular “Venus” that didn’t look like me. It is this cultural history of female exposé, mutation and myth that I create work to reflect an autobiographical history of invisible blackness, passing and ambiguity within this cultural history. I am interested in the way marginalized bodies and that of my own body have been imagined, invented and shaped through societal interpretations and the spaces they inhabit.

The experience of “Double-Consciousness” and shape-shifting are on-going themes and exploration in my studio practice.