Mask

Artist, writer, editor, teacher, Mira Schor work at the intersection of language and painting. As an American artist, she has a unique and singular place in the contemporary art scene through her dual commitment, both visual and intellectual.

Like diaries, these twenty-one double-sided masks made of rice paper and covered with writing and architectural sketches are meant to be looked at by one person at a time, to be read in an intimate and mysterious face to face. Mira Schor explains: "The openings for eyes when they occur allow the wearer or the viewer to see out but also sometimes to see in, and in the case of the installation at the Bourse de Commerce, the ability of two friends to see each other through my layers of consciousness." At the time of their creation, Mira Schor's intention was to reveal and yet to disrupt the legibility of a woman's inner life, by using erasure, overloading, and transparency. When they are not framed, some of the masks are in fact books whose pages can be turned. 
In relation to the conceptual and performance work of the feminist artists of the 1970s in the United States, Mira Schor created these masks that bear witness to the female experience and the way in which it is constructed through language and materiality.
Writing takes the form of an image and her writings are superimposed on translucent paper until they become indecipherable, purely visual forms that symbolize thought.

This work was first shown by the Pinault Collection in 2023 in Mira Schor exhibition « Moon Room », Bourse de Commerce, Paris.