Ava Wanbli
BY RECONSTRUCTING DYNAMICS OF DISRUPTION AND INTIMACY, WANBLI WRESTS THE NARRATIVE OF QUEER AND TRANS SEXUALITY FROM THE GAZE OF FETISHIZATION INTO AFFIRMING GESTURES OF INTIMACY AND EUPHORIC TRANSCENDENCE.
Presented in a two-channel video installation, Sertraline Dolls is a record of Wanbli’s ongoing performance of communing with avatar proxies of her past selves in a ritualized expression of sexual consumption. Side A contains multiple digitally rendered 3D scans of the artist’s body captured over a period of six years while Side B records a sexual encounter between the artist and a 3D replica of her “boy body” captured several years prior. Wanbli conceived of this body of work as a “living archive” which allows her to commune with past selves in the virtual realm. This gesture refutes the binary conception of gender transition as a finite and linear progression, instead promoting an ethos of radical agency over one’s body and image.
Ava Wanbli, 2022, image courtesy of the artist
Ava Wanbli, still from "Sertraline Dolls", 2023, image courtesy of the artist
Ava Wanbli, still from "Sertraline Dolls", 2023, image courtesy of the artist
Ava Wanbli, still from "Sertraline Dolls", 2023, image courtesy of the artist
Ava Wanbli, still from "Sertraline Dolls", 2023, image courtesy of the artist
Ava Wanbli is a Chicago-based new media and performance artist whose practice interrogates dynamics of intimacy and self-representation through eroticized meditations on the body. Wanbli received her MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from The School of Art Institute of Chicago.
She can be found through her Instagram, @avamirage or her website, avawanbli.com.