The Arrows of Concerns
Ordinary Girl
Dodge The Bullet
False Sense of Familiarity

Selected Works

Contact / CV
Press

Ordinary Girl, 2026
Paula Punkstina & Aida Valdés
The Crooked Studio

Are you natural or are you artificial? The question presents itself as a binary only to reveal the instability upon which the distinction depends. "Natural" continues to function as a regulatory fiction, carrying the promise of authenticity, coherence, and origin, while the "artificial" is persistently aligned with ornament, performance, excess, and fabrication, categories historically coded as feminine and therefore secondary. Yet these terms do not describe ontological conditions so much as they organize visibility itself. They determine which bodies appear as self-evident and which remain marked by labor, mediation, and construction. Rather than opposing one another, the natural and the artificial exist in a relation of mutual production, each requiring the other to secure its own authority.

THE BEST PART IS THAT YOU GET TO BE WHOEVER YOU WANNA BE. When I was six or seven, I told my mother I no longer wanted to watch cartoons. I wanted to watch Hannah Montana. She cried. Years later, she called to ask how I was doing. I told her I was like Hannah Montana, living the best of both worlds. She laughed. I still don't know where one world ends and the other begins.

This anecdote does not operate as confession or nostalgia. It points instead toward the instability of identity itself. What appears as authenticity is always mediated by performance, repetition, and image. The promise of "being oneself" unfolds through acts of citation, borrowing, and imitation. Identity is less an essence than a choreography of appearances.

Within this economy, blondness emerges as a particularly dense cultural technology. Blonde hair has never been merely descriptive; it functions as an image continuously reproduced across cinema, advertising, celebrity culture, and commodity aesthetics. Its persistence lies precisely in its ambiguity. It oscillates between innocence and spectacle, purity and artifice, aspiration and parody. The bottle blonde occupies an especially unstable position, making visible the labor of transformation while simultaneously aspiring to erase its own intervention. The artificial here does not conceal nature but produces the very effect of naturalness.

Hannah Montana appears less as a pop-cultural reference than as a conceptual apparatus. The wig does not conceal an authentic subject waiting beneath representation. It performs a more radical operation: it materializes identity as something relational, iterable, and contingent. The wig is neither accessory nor disguise. It is an infrastructure of becoming, a device through which multiple subject positions coexist without requiring resolution. Representation no longer follows identity; it constitutes the conditions under which identity becomes legible at all.

The exhibition approaches sculpture through this same logic. Objects do not stand in for something absent, nor do they merely symbolize cultural narratives. They operate as technologies of mediation, occupying the unstable threshold where materiality and image become indistinguishable. They are simultaneously what they are and what they perform, refusing the distinction between object and sign. In this sense, the artificial is not opposed to the real. It names the conditions through which reality itself is continuously fabricated, rehearsed, and sustained.

I return to the question. Are you natural or are you artificial? The answer remains suspended because the distinction itself has already begun to dissolve. Hannah and Miley do not occupy opposite sides of an authentic self. They exist simultaneously, each producing the other. What circulates is never original. Every image arrives already borrowed, every gesture already repeated, every body already mediated. The artificial is not the failure of authenticity. It is the condition through which authenticity becomes imaginable.