Angelica Starcovic (she, they) is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Cameron, West Virginia. She received a BS in Psychology accompanied by a minor in studio art from Fairmont State University in 2021 and is currently pursuing an MFA from Syracuse University. Angelica has been awarded residencies in Los Angeles through the Syracuse University Turner Residency in 2022 and The Mudhouse Residency in Crete, Greece in 2023. Her practice is driven by socially constructed notions of femininity that inform her perceptions of personal self and public body through a critical intersectional lens. Violence and fear center themselves as integral contributions to the expressions of femme identity she explores in her work.
Deeply rooted in this sense of fear, she links generational practices of femininity to the submissive social standards of heteronormative binary as trauma survival. Drawing on the history of femme representation in art, the history of psychiatric analysis of the femme, social subscription to gender performance, and the implications of religion woven within these ideas, she masticates the contradictions between her sense of inner self and the violence of male desire projected upon it. The resulting aesthetics of bodily horror and sadistic exhibition serve as metaphors for psychological wounding inflicted onto flesh by these structures. They serve as tangible sites of its abuse for viewers to ponder the ethics of voyeurism in the midst of pervasive hyper-sexualization and objectification against a subject’s will.