Acrylic, digital print on paper, glitter on canvas, 25 x 25 cm
From the series: Suicide Attempts
LooksLike confronts the entanglement of death, glamour, and media spectacle with raw and layered urgency. At its center: an AI-processed face, drawn from a real news article reporting Marilyn Monroe’s death. The headline — “It looks like suicide” — does not simply reference history; it wounds, it provokes.
The work suspends itself in the volatile space between the mythologized allure of celebrity and the unvarnished brutality of bodily disappearance. The body, here, appears in fragments — both hyper-visible and vanishing. Torn photographs of the artist’s naked body, soaked in red and yellow, collide with distorted textures and ghostly residues. Life and death bleed into one another; the body, trapped mid-transition, flickers between spectacle and ruin.
The AI-rendered face deepens the disturbance — familiar yet hollow, a haunting of recognition without substance. Identity itself — dismantled, recomposed, emptied — becomes a transactional surface.
By invoking Monroe — a figure consumed and re-consumed by the machinery of fame — LooksLike shifts the narrative of suicide away from personal tragedy and into the terrain of cultural exploitation. Monroe’s death, stripped of grief, has become a consumable myth, a spectacle endlessly repackaged for public appetite. The work asks: When does death transform from mourning to entertainment? Whose suffering is rendered legible, and whose is erased?
But this is not just a body. It is a queer, trans body — hyper-visible, hyper-scrutinized, and politically marginalized. By placing this body in dialogue with Monroe’s, LooksLike fractures the aesthetics of martyrdom. It refuses the smooth arc of tragedy. It refuses assimilation into the machinery of consumption.
The red slashes that tear through the composition function as interruptions — violent refusals of coherence, slashes through the fantasy of closure. LooksLike denies the viewer the ease of resolution. It insists on the ongoing discomfort of seeing death and glamour occupy the same frame, the same wound.
It holds its ground in the unresolved space between seduction and destruction, presence and obliteration. And it leaves unanswered — but impossible to ignore — the most brutal question: When does death stop being a tragedy and become a product?