Karen Navarro: The Constructed Self, portraits cut and rebuilt

El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos

Belonging in Modern Times, made in 2019, examines social media platforms and the part they play in how people present themselves and seek external validation of an identity online. Navarro's starting position is that belonging is intrinsic to being human and integral to self-understanding, and that while the need for community is constant, the means of building one has moved from the physical to the digital — with consequences for how people see themselves.

The construction of each portrait is unusually literal. Inspired by the Cubist investigation of materiality and perspective, Navarro makes collaged portraits of people who use these platforms, amplifying the layers that separate an authentic self from a constructed one. Sitters were recruited by open call on social media and asked to wear a specific colour of clothing based on the logo colours of the platform they had contacted her from. Popular hashtags are embossed into the paper, functioning as an invisible tattoo — aspirational words, a call to wear the seal of whichever virtual tribe the wearer wants to belong to.

The Constructed Self

The Constructed Self, made in 2020, extends that enquiry. Navarro departs from the conventional photographic portrait and renders her subjects through constructive and deconstructive methods instead, cutting and reassembling images to build sculptures and collages.

The purpose is to disrupt photography's flat two-dimensional surface: by using the photograph as the raw material for a three-dimensional object, the work challenges visual perception directly rather than describing a challenge to it. The implication the series carries is that identity is a social construct, and it engages along the way with questions of existentialism.

Taken together, the two projects make a single argument from two directions — one about the identity a platform asks for, the other about the identity a photograph appears to deliver.

A multidisciplinary practice on identity

Navarro is an Argentine-born multidisciplinary artist living and working in Houston, whose work spans photography, collage and sculpture and centres on identity. Trained as a fashion designer and photographer, she studied at the University of Buenos Aires and completed the certificate programme in photography at Houston Center for Photography. Her constructed portraits are recognisable for their use of colour theory, surreal scenes and minimalist detail.

In 2018 she received the Glassell School of Art scholarship from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and in 2019 an Artadia fellowship.

Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, with selected shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Galerija Upuluh in Zagreb, Lawndale Art Center and Houston Center for Photography in Houston, the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin, Melkweg Expo in Amsterdam, and the Museo de la Reconquista in Tigre, Argentina.

The fashion-design training is not incidental. Both projects treat the photographic print as material to be cut, folded and reassembled rather than as a window to look through, and the instinct to build rather than to capture is what connects the embossed hashtags of the first series to the freestanding objects of the second.

It also explains the recruitment method. Asking sitters to arrive in the colours of the platform that brought them, and then embossing the words they use into the paper their own portrait is printed on, treats the subject's online identity as a supplied material like any other.

There is also a quieter argument in the work about what a portrait owes its sitter. A conventional portrait promises likeness — the claim that this is what the person looks like — and the online profile makes the same promise in a different register. Navarro's cutting withdraws that promise deliberately: a face reassembled in staggered planes, or extruded into a freestanding block, can no longer be checked against its subject, and the viewer is left holding the construction instead of the person. That is a more precise account of self-presentation on a platform than any straight photograph of someone using a phone could give. The migration in her own biography, from Argentina to Texas, sits underneath the theme without being illustrated by it — belonging, in both projects, is something assembled from available materials rather than inherited whole.