Beach Towel, 2010 - Alexa Gerrity

The multimedia artist Alexa Gerrity employs strategies from psychology, acting, art history, and other fields to investigate the nature of identity, particularly female identity. Always using body doubles to portray herself in her video pieces, the artist has dug deep into the vanity and illusion involved in creating a persona, once using a professional casting call in Los Angeles to screen actresses who look like her as a reflexive commentary on her own work.

Further pursuing this theme of mirroring, Gerrity has also drawn on the psychological phenomenon known as the "Venus Effect," which describes the belief most viewers have that the goddesses in famous Venus-and-mirror paintings—the most celebrated being Velazquez's Rokeby Venus—when in fact the angle of the mirror means the deity is actually peering at the viewer. The artist's work has been exhibited in many gallery shows and art fairs.
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