Title: “I am a woman and I feast on memory.”
Artist: Ilona Szwarc
Additional contributor: None
Designer: Michela Povoleri
Editor: Ilona Szwarc
Imprint: Ilona Szwarc
Printer: Magcloud
Publication date and place: September 2015 / Los Angeles, California, USA
Edition: 500
Format, binding: Softcover / Perfect-bound
Size: 8.25 in x 10.75 in (20.95 cm x 27.30 cm)
Number of pages and images: (36 pages / 23 images)
Type of printing and paper: HP Indigo digital press/ 80# text stock (acid free)
Retail price: $60
Book Description: In this, her first book, Ilona Szwarc is dissecting the process of becoming: how an individual assimilates and makes oneself imperceptible in society while engaging a series of internal and external transformations.
Each part of the triptych, consisting of 23 sequential portraits, takes the form of stage makeup tutorials. By employing lookalikes, women who share her general appearance, the artist is placing herself at once as the subject and the object in the photographs. In this step by step process she is manipulating her own image through a proxy: her American doppelganger.
These carefully staged photographs confuse the relationship between a portrait or a self-portrait. Szwarc is directing a compelling narrative, in which through cinematic closeups of her painting and drawing on the model’s face, she first creates an uncanny portrait of an aged woman, then through abstract and colorful mark-making she transforms her into a large woman. The series culminates with an androgynous, grotesque, saintly mask, a contemporary Vera Icon of her doppelganger.
Book Soundtrack:
- Title: I am a Woman and I Feast on Memory