Karen Navarro

El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times)

El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times)(2019) explores social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, and examines their role in how we present ourselves, as well as how we externally validate our identity online. Inspired by the Cubist investigation of materiality and perspective, I create collaged portraits of subjects who utilize these platforms as a way to amplify the layers distancing the subjects’ authentic selves from their constructed selves—underscoring the mutability of identity in the digital age. Embossed on the paper are the words of popular hashtags. Acting as an invisible tattoo, these words are aspirational, a call to wear the seal of the virtual tribe you wish to belong to.

Photographer

Karen Navarro

With a background in fashion design, Argentina-born artist, Karen Navarro, works with a highly stylized aesthetic on a diverse array of mediums that includes photography, collage, and sculpture. Her constructed portraits, as she describes it herself, are known for the use of color theory, surreal scenes and minimalist details. Navarro’s work expresses self-referential questions that connect in a much larger scale to ideas of construction of identity, societal expectations and the understanding of the being; prompting a discourse about the subconscious will to comply with the contemporary societies' canons when these are in fact misleading. Similarly, Navarro explores in her work femininity as a cultural construct.

Navarro lives in Houston since 2014 where she completed the certificate program in photography at Houston Center for Photography. In 2018. Navarro has been awarded a scholarship at Glassell School of Art| The Museum of Fine Art Houston where she studied analog photography. Most recently Navarro has received the Artadia fellowship 2019. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad.

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