If I was neatly wrapped in a bow, a price sticker on my forehead, who would see me as the perfect gift? Likewise, what consumer would want to purchase the persona, mind, and soul of Gigi?
I haven’t taken any business classes in my time at UW, but I am guessing that they teach you to analyze the crowd you are interested in “working with” in groups of aestheticized people labeled as consumers.
People are packaged.
Artists become brands,
Within this system, I find myself tangled in the juxtaposition of resistance, creativity, and performance all at once – as the person of this persona.
But i’m not a passive object.
I’m a curated contradiction.
I am formed by the life I have lived.
So then where does my story end and the institution’s story begin?
I think that my studies in CHID, DXARTS, and AIS have pushed my threshold of wonder into a new realm. The foundation of each division is to explore the world beyond your means, in your own way, to express something for the first time. Each discipline – interdisciplinary by nature and design – asks me to move beyond what is given, what is inherited, what is assumed. They invite refusal, not out of cynicism, but out of a deep desire to imagine otherwise. To study within these fields is to dismantle linearity, to question origins, to experiment without apology. They’ve taught me that expression is not always about mastery, but about making something for the first time; awkward, emergent, and real.
But what does refusal look like, in a culture obsessed with visibility?
Because I’m not here to explain myself.
I’m here to express something that hasn’t existed yet.
Each medium I try to create myself through.
I believe I am witnessing the birth and growth of each moment in life flow into the fleeting wisp of time.
