Ariana Leon
Happy Birthday, Sweetie, 2023
Mylar, wood, paper
72x72x48 inches
 
 
My practice centres on large-scale, provocative works that address trauma‚ particularly femme trauma. In the act of making, I enter a pas-de-deux with the viewer: approaching, confronting, and looking through you. I expose myself relentlessly, laying bare the violences and vulnerabilities of my past, examining how trauma inscribes itself onto the other. My victimhood becomes powerful and taunting, resisting spectacle while demanding visceral recognition. Happy Birthday, Sweetie explores the tension between joy and trauma through altered party hats‚ once symbols of celebration, now rendered as reflective, monochromatic forms that simultaneously invite and repel. Childhood play and femme identity are reframed as sites of both vulnerability and power. What initially appears festive becomes a meditation on surveillance, reflection, and the unstable boundary between pleasure and pain. By draining colour and exaggerating scale, I confront expectations of femininity and reclaim the aesthetics of celebration as acts of resilience and feminist resistance.