Auditioning Genders
( ongoing project )
« Auditioning Genders » is a project on the photographic portrait that questions the notion of gender from an intimate perspective
For this particular approach to portraiture, Isabelle asks her models to bring out a personal gendered quality with which they are not socially identified
ProtocolThe artist asks the model to project visually, what they feel inside that belongs to the opposite sex and that they do not openly express in their social life
To go beyond the male-female dichotomy, the artist will also suggest that her models choose from several genders: for instance, the 7 “kinds” that some North American universities present on their application forms
Isabelle Grosse-Mileo aims to avoid caricatured photographs; the models are not asked to perform and play another gender but to draw on their emotions and personal experience
"Auditioning Genders" is a process that wants to capture the living effervescence of genders that coexist within us and make them emerge in a peaceful coexistence through photographic work
Auditioning Genders is also about the photographic act of shaping genders. It refers to the idea of gender as performance, popularized by American poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler.
With this project, the artist continues her work on frameworks and forms, both social and aesthetic structures
