Nina Dotti (B.1968) is a Venezuelan artist who lives and works in Miami, Florida. She has a Bachelor’s in Museum Studies and Art History from Jose Maria Vargas University in Caracas. Dotti also specialized in photography at Roberto Mata School and went to the Art Student League of New York for sculpture and drawing.
Through installations, performances, video and photography Nina Dotti represents, using irony and humor, any issue of the XXI century society. Through out them she articulates the complex dynamics of her intertwined feelings in connection with the traditional society. Nina’s inspiration derives from social clichés attached to women and female behavior in general. Defined as a new contemporary artist and “pluralized women” by French critic Frederic Charles Baitinger, Nina attempts to evoke through her work, women’s role in the XX century.
A pluralized woman
“Becoming a woman and wondering what a woman is are two essentially different things. I would go even further—it’s because one doesn’t become one that one wonders and, up to a point, to wonder is the contrary of becoming one.”
– Jacques Lacan
If Simone de Beauvoir was the first woman who dared to ask, in all its complexity, the question: What does it mean to be a woman? and if to that question, she replied, “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman,” we must not conclude, as Lacan’s above quote seems to suggest, that a woman only truly becomes a woman as soon as she fails to reflect on her condition. Very much on the contrary, it would seem more fair to say, along the lines of what Nina Dotti suggests through her creations, that it is only when a woman can maintain a critical relationship with the clichés (or the ‘genders’, as Judith Butler would say) that are imposed on “la” femme by our Western societies, that she can become a truly free woman, in other words, a woman capable of living in a non-conflictual mode with the complexity of her condition.
This is, without doubt, the reason for which Nina Dotti not only produced, for her next exhibition, a series of photographs presenting the image of a Barbie Humanizer authoritatively asserting her ability to be all the women she is supposed to be (Barbie Humanizer is simultaneously a femme fatale, a housewife, and a business woman), but she also saw fit to add to this image of the woman a series of sculptures representing (in the form of golden scales) the myriad unconscious balancing acts underlying such a representation. For it is clear that for a woman to reach her full potential, she must not only model her behavior after an all-powerful woman, but must also understand that this omnipotence can only be attained if she allows herself to harmonize, in her heart of hearts, the array of tendencies that composes her being.
Frédéric-Charles Baitinger Translation by Cassandra Katsiaficas
Additional information:
Source: http://vaearts.org/US/
