maya escobar

Acciones Plásticas プリクラ is a collaboration between St. Louis based artist Maya Escobar and San Francisco based artist Rio Yañez.

Maya Escobar is a Guatemalan-Jewish digital media and performance artist, currently living in St. Louis. Her work addresses issues of cultural hybridity, gender, placelessness, and the construction of identity. Rio Yañez is a Chicano curator, photographer, and graphic artist based out of San Francisco. His work utilizes and challenges Chicano mythology and visual iconography.

In Acciones Plásticas Escobar created a multi-faceted “doll” by assuming the role of designer and distributor, and even posing as the actual doll itself. Each doll was a satirical characterization of some of the many roles that have been projected upon her, and into which she has, at points, inevitably fallen. In conjunction with these images, she developed a short series of low-definition youtube video blogs through which she inhabits the lives of “real women” who have each been visibly defined by societal constructs.

Recently, Yañez has been utilizing Japanese photobooths (known as Purikura or “print-club”) as an artist’s tool for creating portraits. These booths are much more common in Japan than their United States counterparts. As a catalyst for creative expression and social interaction they are used primarily by young urban Japanese girls. A standard feature in all Purikura booths allows the user to digitally decorate their portraits after they take them. The options are vast and include wild characters, excessive starbursts of light, pre-made phrases and the option to draw your own text directly on the image. Purikura gives the subjects near-divine powers of self-expression in crafting their own portraits.

The two artists who met over the web, decided to bring together Escobar’s highly charged and evocative Acciones Plásticas characters with Yanez’s notorious Chicano graphic-art style and new found obsession with Purikura images, as a way of addressing the construction of Latina identities.

Maya posed as The Latina Hipster: a bad-ass Morrissey-lovin’, tuff-girl sexy chica; The Latina Role Model: a diploma totin’ intellectual, sexy, social media goddess; and finally, The Homegirl: a hybridized version of Escobar’s Midwestern Chach (or Chachi Mama) and Yañez’s West Coast Chola.

Maya sent digital images to Rio, who in turn drew portraits of her as each of these constructed identities, approaching each portrait with a Purikura sensibility and decorating them each as the characters represented might accessorize themselves.

The final series of portraits is the result of negotiating multiple identities and influences. Guatemalan, Jewish, and Chicano sensibilities reflected back through a Japanese Purikura aesthetic. Acciones Plásticas プリクラ challenge and question the thin line between archetype and stereotype. The Purikura elements present the novel signifiers of each social construct represented in the series.

This collaboration is the first of many to come as Maya and Rio explore the commonalities and differences of their cultural identities.

En la serie Acciones Plásticas, diseñé una “muñeca” polifacética, asumiendo el papel de diseñadora y distribuidora, e incluso posando yo misma como muñeca. Mi producto “se presenta” en cinco estilos distintos: The Orthodox Jew© (La Judía Ortodoxa),The JAP© (La Princesa Judía Estadounidense),The Chach©, (La Chach), The Sexy Latina© (La Latina Sexy), y The Mayan© (La Maya). Cada muñeca es una caracterización satírica de los muchos roles que esta sociedad ha proyectado en mí, y en los cuáles, he caído inevitablemente hasta cierto punto.

Las muñecas siempre aparecen aisladas totalmente de su ambiente previsto que las circunda. Nunca realizan realmente su ritual presagiado; en su lugar modelan simplemente la actitud en la cual su acción pronosticada ocurriría normalmente. Como “objetos étnicos”, las muñecas se remueven de su contexto original. Como las muñecas comerciales reales u otros artefactos de la cultura popular, el espectador las observa sin consideración de temas socioeconómicos relevantes, de herencia, o de prácticas culturales.

Simultáneamente con estas imágenes, desarrollé una serie de cortometrajes en las cuales hago los papeles de “mujeres reales” cuyas vidas han sido definidas visiblemente por estas construcciones sociales. Siguiendo el modelo de los perfiles de “MySpace”,  “YouTube video blogs”, las películas tienen la intención de atraer a las muchachas de la escuela secundaria, que están acostumbradas a la cultura de la auto-promoción que es frecuente en esas comunidades virtuales. Al crear este trabajo, he sido muy consciente de la línea sutil entre la auto-explotación y la utilización apropiada, con respecto a mi propio estado como representante de una mayor identidad cultural. Desde el inicio del proyecto, he incorporado continuamente y dado el mismo valor a los comentarios de otras mujeres jóvenes, haciendo de este espacio un lugar de actuación continua e interactiva. Acciones Plásticas por sí misma no proporciona una resolución real, tangible; en cambio, funciona astutamente como un catalizador creando el diálogo que es primordial en el proceso del auto desarrollo de las mujeres jóvenes.