Attitude is Everything: Carrie Chen ✧
Attitude is Everything: Carrie Chen ✧
Now Minting: "Eye Exercise (Miss America)"
Carrie Chen’s Eye Exercise (Miss America) is the latest in a series of animated portraits of artist’s younger self, practicing the daily eye exercise often mandated in mainland Chinese elementary schools. Set against a glittering backdrop, the young Carrie is reimagined as a beauty pageant contestant, wearing a “Miss America” sash and framed by scrolling text about the importance of good vision: Persistence leads to success. Attitude is everything.
Playfully exploring the act of eye-rolling as both compliance and defiance, the animation is rich with detail, subtly weaving in elements that reflect the artists’s Chinese American identity and the nuances of cultural hybridity.
“There is this connection to the image, this representational awareness that this Carrie is ‘Carrie’ in some ways, although not fully.”
— Carrie Chen
About Carrie Chen
Carrie Chen is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Working with CG animation, simulation technologies and multimedia installation, she explores how digital figuration can be a poetic and multidimensional way to process and express ideas about cultural hybridity, representation, time and memory.
Growing up between the US and China, Chen's practice draws on non-Western ontologies and narratives while also deconstructing and reconfiguring her Chinese-American identity, experience and ancestry. With a trans-disciplinary approach informed by Applied Psychology and Art History, Chen is interested in what she calls the “productive uncanny” and engages with the complexities of social behavior, digital bodies, culture and technology.
About Gemma
Gemma is an emerging community co-inhabited by artists, curators, and contributors with a shared vision for how culture can shape our future. This summer Gemma is releasing weekly open editions from our Founding Artists, which you can mint now. Subscribe and follow us on Instagram and Twitter to be notified about new releases.