@gloh_visual / gloriahhh.cargo.site
Who am I, really? This question demands answers, yet when I
reach into myself, I rarely find a satisfactory confirmation. In my
lived history of navigation across geographies, languages, and
ways of being, I falter in my attempts to consolidate a recogniz-
able identity of my own. I have little to no sense of self. When my
thoughts feel uncertain, my only apparent certainty seems to be
the body I inhabit; the body that others perceive and observes
the world in return. But is that really the case?
“Self-identity is a bad visual system,” Donna Haraway writes
in The Persistence of Vision. Identity is not a fixed or universal
construct, rather, it is shaped by situated perceptions and
power structures. Design as we know it is built upon coherence
and legibility. This leads me to ask: How might visual identity
design reflect the instability of selfhood through the lens of
the body?
By parodying conventions of brand design, BODY OF
WORK engages with narratives of personal identity, interrogat-
ing how design disciplines codify, package, and impose meaning
onto something that is fundamentally in flux. BODY OF WORK
examines the tension between identity as a construct and iden-
tity as an embodied, shifting experience. Poetic, visceral, and
elusive, I explore both the body-self and the self as a body—
that is to say, this body is me.
Boston University College of Fine Arts
School of Visual Arts