Silent Simon Says

'Silent Simon Says' is an installation piece focused around a performance carried out with Maria Fsadni. The body of work explores and brings awareness to the act of social conformity - an obligatory feeling to follow the norm. Through today’s accessibility of sharing platforms such as; Instagram, Facebook, magazines, advertisement, blogs and so on, the opportunity to construct, project and take in new ideals and expectations on the ‘right way’ to live and look has increased. Such influences have become the new ‘Simon Says’. The performance includes two participants, one representing a victim of such conformity, and the other the driving influence. The influencer paints formal outlines upon a large paper, within which the other participant has to attempt to fit. The process repeats itself, with the influencer making each following form increasingly harder to fit within. The idea behind this increase in formal difficulty, aims to visually embody the unattainability that comes with social conformity. The use of performance conceptually ties to the reality that it is one’s physical body that is put through such conforming practices. Here the idea of conforming is removed from its intangibility and translated into a literal act of physical formation. The work is installed with a series of stills extracted from the footage that visually condenses the strongest representations of social conformity, the performative video, and resulting painting.