Graduate student’s artwork harnesses hyper-femininity to comment on identity
Expanding upon her background in computer science and website design, design media arts graduate student Maya Man opened her first solo show titled “Secrets From a Girl” at the Broad Art Center on April 19.
Man sits at a vanity in front of a laptop displaying snapshots, which are also seen on the computer beside the vanity. For “Secrets From a Girl,” Man said she wanted to transform the exhibition space into one that looked similar to her childhood bedroom. (Christine Kao/Daily Bruin staff) Maya Man is refreshing the tab and building her avatar offline.
Expanding upon her background in computer science and website design, the design media arts graduate student opened her first solo show titled “Secrets From a Girl” at the Broad Art Center on April 19. Man said she specializes in browser-based generative art, a medium that allows her creations to exist as live algorithms in the digital universe. Named after a Lorde song in which a woman imparts wisdom to her younger self, she said the exhibit is similarly a reflection on female adolescence and how gender performance is guided by internet culture.
“My identity has been extremely shaped by the time that I spend online,” Man said. “I want to make work that is native to the internet and that I put online that also comments on it (the internet).”
Man’s interest in the consumption of online information is exemplified in “Read it and Weep,” one of the exhibit’s three code-based projects, she said. The generative piece is a website that extracts excerpts from Man’s personal diary entries, sociological articles on gender, as well as random web fragments which she refers to as internet trash, Man said. In order to capture how one is constantly curating and altering their identity online, she said she constructed the algorithm to unpredictably layer the word fragments on a screen in varying fonts.
As an ode to the lifestyle publication she grew up reading, Man said the exhibit’s poster fliers are designed to mimic the format of a Seventeen magazine cover. Man said by drawing comparisons between modern-day social media and popular 2000s beauty magazines, she intended to trace the progression of mediums that act as instructional manuals for young women. Including captions on the mock cover like “The Trick to Intersecting Art and Technology: He’ll LOVE This Move,” she said studying the language used in women’s magazines was vital to understanding the heteronormative, male gaze perspective it promotes.
“I think a lot about the language and how much is imparted about how a woman should be through this language and through these visuals,” Man said. “It’s in a way that’s framed as silly and fun and looked down on by the rest of the culture but has a very serious impact on us.”
Although her work critiques the role of societal conditioning in womanhood, Man said she does not consider her work to be fully satirical. When manipulating cultural products of hyper-femininity for creative purposes, she said disparaging commodities enjoyed by many women including herself would only perpetuate the misogynistic lens she aspires to confront. She said her approach is to express her genuine appreciation for femininity while examining the difficult relationship she has with it. — Mindy Luo, April 27, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
