Beautiful People
The Beautiful People project seeks to increase the positive representation of alternative forms of beauty. Tired of seeing the same faces in all portraits, I decided to create a collection of artworks depicting characters that didn’t conform with society’s definition of beautiful, featuring both feminine and masculine features, to break with the idea that non-binary identities always present androgyny, and celebrating some of my own insecurities such as curly hair or crooked teeth.
The project went on for months, as I shared the process behind creating each one of the 100 characters I drew, and one of its milestones was celebrating the Beautiful People Exhibition, which also featured 6 international artists.
The exhibition was held at a bar, where attendees were encouraged to interact with each other, have a drink or burger and familiarize themselves with these faces they hadn’t seen represented in the media before.
It is through the study of representation and its relationship with power that I was able to grasp the consequences beauty standards had had on minorities, there being direct links between one’s perception of beauty and their self-esteem, and discovering the dark background of some racially motivated beauty ideals.
