Baron by Petra Collins

For the sixth edition of Baron, artist Petra Collins flips the camera lens onto herself… more specifically into herself. Uninhibited, gross, disjointed, and confusing, Collins places us in a world filled with perverse personal thoughts and lucid landscapes.

With the book’s Hungarian title Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is? Collins asks us: Why be you, when you can be me? Collins uses the camera as the third person. It captures historical truths (such as a time and place) and an emotional reality with a complicated relationship to intention and perception. This new body of work investigates the evolvement of todays image sharing society and whether this is changing our relationship to ourselves and the world.

Working with the sculptor Sarah Sitkin, Collins creates moulds of her body as well as her sisters to gain ownership, in a world where our bodies live in multiple realities. This new body of work features Collins first experiments with self-portraiture.