During Dutch Design Week 2024, Nabuurs&VanDoorn replaced ordinary mirrors at the salon of hairstylist Antoine Pour Toi with magic mirrors to confront clients with provocative scenes of their Vanitas Pop Doubles and transform a haircut into a psychological encounter with the dark culture of original sin. By their replacement of white cube for real life setting they expose Western culture rendering Art dysfunctional. The mirror becomes a mask and connects past to future to celebrate life and death.
Sylvia Plath's undergraduate thesis, titled “The Magic Mirror” (1954) explores doubles made up of a character’s repressed traits, and, as the double grows in power, it heralds the protagonist’s death. Citing Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” as well as Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, Plath argued that the choice to create a double works to “reveal hitherto concealed character traits in a radical manner” and simultaneously exposes the driving conflicts of the narrative housing that character.
Throughout history, make-up has often been viewed with suspicion and compared to the wearing of a mask: a mask to hide one’s true nature. However, like paint, make-up can be a form of artistic expression, playfulness and experimentation. In this work, Nabuurs&VanDoorn use make-up not to disguise themselves, but as instrument to lay bare hypocrisy, deceitfulness, opportunism and treacherous malice.
An early definition of “make-up” in English is “a made story, an invention, a fiction”. In other languages, such as Italian, the word for make-up, “trucco”, means the act of applying cosmetics to render your face more pleasing, but “trucco” can also be interpreted as a magic trick, a deceit, a fraud.
In these photographs
Nabuurs&VanDoorn examine identity and continually adopt different personas through make-up, clothing, and accessories. In 2012, they created these works featuring heavily made-up middle-aged men. They used prosthetic make-up and exaggerated contouring and highlighting these techniques to respond to contemporary media’s ongoing obsession with refashioning one’s appearance.
Significant societal changes in discussions about whiteness and colonialism have led to anti-racist and inclusive efforts infiltrating the cosmetics industry. Racialized whiteness encompasses more than just skin color, it involves the social constructs and priviliges associated with being white and maintaining racial hierarchies. This work shows us historical examples of white stereotypes made contemporary in the form of make-up.
Comments