Mise en Abyme: Zooming in on Visual Pleasure

Szamosi, Sofia.
Social Me

"There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching." (Regarding the pain of others / Sontag, Susan)

"My social media box set documents my various attempts over the last two years to understand my complicated relationship to social media and the hidden forces that drive it." (Szamosi, Sofia. Social Me : Sofia Szamosi's Social Media Box Set. New York, New York: Sofia Szamosi, 2018.)

"Drawing instagram posts is a way for me to re-contextualize and digest images that intrigue or confuse me. I change the medium to give new light and space to these images and words, and unlock layers of meaning."

"Many of the women featured in the Girls on Instagram series are friends who volunteered their posts. Many others are strangers who I found searching through hashtags."

"The word 'girl,' so often pejorative and infantilizing, I use purposefully - the women in my collections are performing girl-dom on a platform that validates their performance. I am interested in the many ways of being and performing 'girl' within the context of social media, how those performances are encouraged and propagated, and how they may be limiting, empowering, or something in between." 

See also: Szamosi, Sofia. #Metoo on Instagram : One Year Later.  New York, N.Y: Sofia Szamosi, 2018.

Agid, Shana. Snitch

"Snitch is a pop-up book about surveillance. More specifically, it is about the ways people talk about it and how. This continues even as many people resist some forms of surveillance. We help it operate every day. While the explosion of new surveillance in recent years is daunting, this book focuses on long-standing, common-sense ideas about what we should be afraid of, and how that helps sell the idea that expected forms of surveillance make us safer." (Booklyn website)