Artist Statement

Yasemin Gunhos's practice takes on the virtual and the real not as opposing conditions but as different states of the same condition, where identity becomes something tested rather than declared. Identity here is not a completed whole but a continually re-emerging event. The artist uses her own 3D avatar as the site where this occurs. The avatar is not a representation but a condition Gunhos's selfhood actually inhabits; it is not an image looked back upon, as in a painting or photograph, but a place that can be stood within, moved through, and inhabited otherwise. At the same time, it opens up a distance: this distance, from which she can look at herself from the outside, makes it possible for her to stage emotions and vulnerabilities she finds difficult to carry directly in the body. In this way the artist can rehearse the self, placing what has never been lived alongside what has. The self, then, is not a fixed essence but a movement reconstituted with each repetition. The same face appears in different scenes and states; none is the original. The body that performs and the body that watches this performance are the same; the distinction between subject and spectator dissolves. Gunhos treats translucency as a material condition of the virtual, making sculptures that hold light the way screens do, suspended between presence and absence. Painting is the site where her physical hand meets its virtual counterpart and pulls modelled scenes into object through its own fallibility. In doing so, she paints not herself, but the self she has constructed.