Joshua Roberts

Bio

Joshua Roberts is a fourth year New Genres undergraduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. His works involve installation, public intervention, and performance. His most recent works have been investigations into the effects of social conditioning. He is from Portland, Oregon.

Statement

For this project, I wanted to investigate the signifiers that code gender. I felt that in order to respond to gendered female social constructions, my first step would be to take myself out of the dominant trope where I come from. I feel that “Another Country” is about a learning experience, and I sure learned plenty about the effort it takes to perform as a female gendered subject. To pluck out my eyebrows, get my face painted, and put on women's clothing was an extremely dislocating and exhausting experience. While performing in the female trope, I noticed how the makeup hid me while at the same time revealed a different, gendered me to the outside world. I chose to use photography because the medium tends to exacerbate the conditioning of the gendered subject.