threadstories
Irish visual artist threadstories questions how the erosion of personal privacy in our digital age affects how we view and portray ourselves online with her collection of masked portraits. Her digital performances can be viewed on the social media platform Instagram predominantly. threadstories is a collection of heavily manipulated facades, laboriously crafted and continually preened, animated through performance, and reworked, the one mask reinventing itself repeatedly. Framed in the format of selfies and short animated video clips, threadstories pokes at the performative nature social media cultivates and celebrates.
The masks deny the viewer the full story of who the sitter is, echoing the curated or false personas we consume online daily. The masks are mutations of our private and public selves.
Through movement, glance, gesture, and stance, the wearer (always threadstories) creates an ambiguous narrative. The malleable forms can be endlessly transformed by brushing, smoothing, exposing a feature, or denying a feature to create countless iterations of one mask. Her curious making process then sees each mask being endlessly reworked and in a constant state of flux and transformation
Persona a solo exhibition by threadstories of images and film is on show at the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, Ireland.
September 3rd-30th 2021