Ava Mirage Wanbli is a New Media artist and performer based in Chicago, IL. Her work operates in a multitude of formats of persona to build engagement through virtual and physical aspects of world construction. Ava utilizes video game engines, live performance, installations, sculptures, video, and body to process components of the self through modalities of becoming. She investigates performing for the camera and virtual reconstructions of the body through 3D scanning, avatar creation, and virtual environment building as a means to collapse temporalities, archiving the body and thus having a lens to a futurity of the self.
By augmenting conditions of authorship and intimacy, Ava reorients erotic imagery, intimacy, and voyeuristic consumption of the body within technology. She aims to confront the voyeur as well as communicate the complexities of trans narratives within the landscapes of hyper-sexualization and subjugation.
Ava Mirage Wanbli received her Masters Degree in Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Alongside her art practice and community engagement, she has been an educator at multiple art institutions for the last 4 years. She is a recipient of 3Arts New Wave Artists Award, and has been a resident of ACRE Artist residency as well as New Art City Residency. Her most current work has shown at Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Gallery in Chicago and is now being shown in a 6 month solo exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Wanbli has also been published in Tone Magazine as well as curated events at Mana Contemporary in Chicago. Ava continues to organize and build spaces to further her commitment to the conversations around her transwoman body and the voice that it can hold to educate, uplift, and complicate narratives around selfhood through hyper-visibility and fetishization.
Artist Statement PDF