Look, See: Maia Horta’s Little Acts of Voyeurism  by Ruth Rosengarten

Maia Horta posts selfies on Facebook. There’s nothing unusual about that, except for the fact that in her selfies, Maia doesn’t project her ‘best’ (most photogenic) face; does not perform the most glamorous, popular ‘self’ that is so often implicit in the trope of the ‘selfie.’ Rather, we see an array of invented personas that, whether photographed or painted, are charged with painterly conventions. But equally striking is the fact that in Maia’s staging of self, facial hair plays a big part: beards, moustaches, lashes that rim the lips in provocative simulacrum of vulvas. And if this were not enough to make one think of the morphological analogies between faces and genitals, Maia often underlines that upper orifice by stuffing something into it (banana, cigarette), or sticking something out of it (bubble gum, tongue.) Not so much an allusion to oral sex, it is as if the whole act of coitus were shamelessly performed upon another bodily stage.
These preoccupations with the visible markers of gender identity – with the making visible of polymorphous gender identity – are rehearsed and reiterated in Maia’s paintings, which concern themselves with the relationship between looking at art and looking at bodies, and in particular, looking at naked female bodies. In this, she partakes of a powerful lineage of feminist artists. 

Participation in independent artist publishings