Estelle Maisonett
Dan’s Supermarket, Mixed media installation, 12’ x 9 x 3’, 2019
In this site-specific installation, I invite viewers to embody unidentified characters like face in hole photo props made of trash collected in NYC. Behind the viewer is a photographic backdrop of canned food stacked on tall shelves outside of a Dyckman street grocery store in my old neighborhood. In front of the viewer, stands a clothed figure on canvas who they now inhabit. What was previously an ambiguous figure is now the viewer.
Typical of my oeuvre, viewers find themselves surrounded by familiar consumer products, which begs the question whether any popular brand or combination of brands essentially available to everyone can be a marker of a specific identity.
About the Artist
Estelle Maisonett is a mixed-media interdisciplinary artist born and raised in the Bronx. She uses found objects, photography, and clothing to document her lived experience while exploring perception of identity through fashion, pattern, consumption, architecture, and material.
Call to Action
I want to entice you to question our pre-conditioned perceptions of reality: Do images of brick equate to an urban landscape? And what associations do you have to a plaid shirt? Materials and objects create visual relationships, defining the value of a space, your relationship with those values, and ideas about who these items might belong to. Objects don't define the individuals who once owned them. Instead, they reflect our own biases and our own assumptions. My work makes climate change personal by archiving the present landscape in the Bronx and upper Manhattan through found objects, photography, and clothing. I ask myself and you to reflect on our own pre-conceived notions of identity and how they may be informed by your personal associations to environment, fashion, material, objects, race, sexual orientation, gender and economic status. I aim to inspire you to reflect on local waste, access, and preconceived notions you have to the current social climate.