Bari Sholom

About

Bari Sholom is an Austin-based multidisciplinary artist working across surreal self-portraiture, photography, and moving image. Drawing from her background in fashion and embodiment, she uses the body to explore identity, desire, labor, consumption, and the performance of being seen.

Statement

My work explores the ways we shape, package, and perform ourselves in order to be loved, valued, desired, or understood. Through surreal self-portraiture and video, I place the body inside exaggerated systems of consumption, labor, beauty, worship, and exchange. Familiar objects and environments become psychologically charged: a woman becomes a product, a body becomes a workplace, and the things meant to grant us freedom begin to weigh us down. My background in fashion, personal styling, and embodiment informs how I understand appearance, not as decoration, but as a language through which identity is constructed and negotiated. I am interested in the tension between choosing who we become and being shaped by what the world rewards. The work often uses humor, beauty, and absurdity as an entry point into something uncomfortable. Rather than resolving these contradictions, I make them physical. I want the image to feel immediately recognizable and slightly impossible, inviting the viewer to question what we consume, what consumes us, and how much of the self can be altered before it becomes something else.

Commissions