You get what. 2022 explores the polarization and the difference between perception and reality.
Michele Landel began by digitally manipulating screenshots of a woman from an online clothing catalog. She chose the same woman twice, in slightly different outfits and poses. The model is the idealized self and acts as a mirror to represent one's longing to appear perfect for others. She printed the altered photographs onto cut up used bedsheets and varnished the fabric to protect and fix the image and also to cause the image to curl and peel. She stitched the stiffened patchwork photographs together onto a second bedsheet to engage the body's perception and knowledge and the physical familiarity associated with textiles.
The doubled figure recurs throughout Landel's work as a way of exploring self reflection and self awareness. Twinning the same woman raises a question she keeps returning to: what is retained as memory, fixed and carried forward, versus what is only a passing state, a mood or a pose that shapes what we call personality in the moment but does not last. The varnish that curls and peels echoes this instability. It holds the image in place while also refusing to let it stay fixed, so that the work, like perception itself, is fluid and resists being grasped at any single moment.