Miss Selfie

MISS SELFIE
Selfish Self Portraits by Vava Venezia

"The Art of the Selfie" 

The selfies works to expand our understanding of the space between one side of the screen and the other.
The selfie is not as simple as snapping a picture of oneself 
the paradox of the internet is that even the most intimate forms of sharing are mediated by a screen. Diverse and individual personas are expressed through a vehicle that can loosely be defined as Selfies.
Techniques range  usual from camera, electronic media, video, digital device to Internet-generated images.
In this case  with the following images  Vava Venezia have used a simple Samsung Mobil Camera. Self-portraiture are often associated with identity, distortion, and individuality. 
The artist is generally both sitter and author or generator in an intimate moment of personal revelation or invention.
The “ Selfies” that  artist Vava Venezia is creating is a journey in self exploration as well as it is an open window to her complexity as a woman 
and  like an x-ray camera would show her body from the inside,
in this way her own mobile camera shows her dreams and nightmares from the inside through her outside. She is in a way using her own pain as a brush and as pain-t in a similar way as Frida Kahlo did so successfully.  At the same time I find it amazing that Vava who belongs to the family of Women artists using themselves as blank canvases, was in fact not aware of the works of pioneer sisters like Cindy Sherman and Yayoi Kusama
or contemporary women artists like Sarah Maple and of course Marina Abramovic. Its clearly shows that Vava has not tried to copy or hang on to any other women artist's train.She is honest in her expression and  she is traveling on her own, making her own journey believable. As I see it, Vava Venezia is herself a camera as much as she is a voyeur and a mirror reflection .She is unique like all of us and at the same time she is close to most women of today, searching for identity and love.
In that way Vava's self-portraying project has reached one goal.
She is now seen by all of us in her privacy and her wish to come out of the closet, and to break  out of her shell have been successful.
Well what more can be said , the photos talk for themselves, while Vava Venezia herself stays silent.

Thomas Dellert
Photographer and Curator.

INTRODUCTION BY THE ARTIST

My name is Vava Venezia
Like every women Im full of insecurities and yet Im very strong as a person
I take these self portraits to search for the woman outside of me, the women reflected in the mirror.
And only by reaching out “selfishly” I have learned to like myself and learned to be compassionate towards myself. This is a strength I have gained by doing my selfies.
Everybody do selfies today, and I believe selfies is a way that people do without knowing that they are actually connecting with some kind of self love, that lift up themselves.
I like to play with the different stereotypes that the world of men have given women.
I do feel naturally sexy in everyday life, and strong in front on my own camera lens,
while I'm in fact extremely shy.
I act out privately, what I never would dare to act out so bluntly in public.
But most of all its a sex and self exploration, a search for the woman inside of me.
Im trying to be brave and provocative. I am a true Voyeur of myself.
The woman I today have become by being bombarded by the mass media vision of a woman,
the fashion worlds vision and the view that most men have when looking at the photos I have taken in my privacy that I now expose to the world, in order to see the reaction.
And maybe in that process , I might find out who I am, and who I want to be.
After all I have the right to choose don't I ?
A women is as beautiful as she sees herself in her mirror and that includes the so called selfie.
Vava Venezia