celebriMe

One of the most deeply rooted and vernacular genres is portraiture with celebrities, in which fans take self-portraits are have their picture taken with a public personality: the consent to pose together is equivalent to a visual autograph. The proliferation of mobile devices with cameras has produced the phenomena of the selfie, while also enabling and intensifying notion of photography as a trophy. Collecting and boasting these trophies is one of the ways of ennobling the narcissistic and compulsive tendency that dominates social networks. Jon Uriarte mocks these new visual habits and in celebriMe (2013-2014) by presenting himself together with a hounded famous personalities. However, we soon discover that these snapshots are mostly in fact intervened and manipulated appropriated images. Uriarte not only makes a parody of great catch of autograph hunters, but also reveals the extent to which vanity trumps veracity in Internet culture; the online profiles that construct so many parallel identities are nothing but pure theatre. The project celebriMe was created to be circulated in social media, where by nature it instigated an interaction with viewers. This reaction has been key in the moment of transferring the work from screen to a exhibition space, since each of the hounded images has been printed the number of times that it generated interactions on the Internet, thus creating a symbolic bridge between cyberspace and the real world.