LooksLike

LooksLike confronts the aesthetics of death, glamour, and media spectacle with raw, layered directness. At its center is a face — processed through AI, sourced from a real news article reporting on Marilyn Monroe’s death. The headline, “It looks like suicide,” does more than reference — it provokes. The work holds the tension between the seductive iconography of fame and the unfiltered brutality of bodily death.

The body in LooksLike exists in fragments — present yet absent, hyper-visible yet erased. Collage becomes both method and message: torn photographs of the artist’s naked body, overlaid with red and yellow pigments, distorted textures, and ghost-like forms. Life and death begin to dissolve into one another; the body, caught mid-transition, oscillates between spectacle and ruin. The AI-generated face intensifies this unease — familiar yet vacant, a hollow mask of recognition. Identity, stripped down and reconstructed, becomes currency.

By invoking Monroe — the ultimate pop culture martyr — LooksLike shifts the narrative of suicide into more unsettling terrain. Her death, long absorbed into the machinery of fame, has become a consumable tragedy: repackaged, resold, endlessly retold. The work asks: When does death become spectacle? When does suffering slip from private grief into public consumption? Whose pain is seen, and whose remains illegible?

This isn’t just a body — it’s a queer body. A trans body — hyper-visible, surveilled, objectified, and politically disavowed. By placing this body in dialogue with Monroe’s, LooksLike fractures dominant narratives of suffering. It refuses the tragic arc. Instead, it reclaims space. The trans body resists packaging. It stands at the threshold of legibility, rejecting assimilation into the smooth aesthetics of media spectacle.

The red slashes that cut through the work act as visual interruptions. They disrupt coherence, refusing the viewer the comfort of resolution. LooksLike withholds catharsis. It insists on the discomfort of glamour and death coexisting in the same frame.

The work holds steady in the tension between allure and destruction, presence and absence. And it asks — without offering an answer — the hardest question of all: When does death stop being a tragedy and become entertainment?