Doris Vila
Three women appear in the piece.
The most visible is the printed Madonna, enshrined in the book as a mythical ideal woman in art and faith, a way to hold women captive in their homes.
The second is a transparent phantom. She is trapped between the lines and her eyes are masked so the text replaces her ability to see.
The third is shown by the hand holding a magnifying glass, floating in front of the picture plane, a stand-in inviting the viewer to a close reading of the canon that holds women captive to a fiction created by male-dominated power structures.
Doris Vila stitches together high and low tech to build narrative spaces. In her responsive environments, viewers' bodies trigger sounds, video and holographic imagery. Story elements stretch out in space as well as time. In recent work, words swarm like birds, flying in and out of linear readability through an artificial-life algorithm.
Born in Miami of Cuban descent, she studied at University of California, Berkeley, and Hunter College. She frequently shows internationally, lectures widely, and is a longtime observer of bird flocks. Lately she has been caught writing stories on an actual page.
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