Untitled No. 12 by Dayani Muñoz Reguera

Untitled No. 1, Digital Collage Digital Print, 2020, 16.54″ x  11.61″ (42×29.7cm)

Open your eyes to every patch of sunshine” is a series of collages, which discusses my experience as an afro-descendant woman in the process of accepting my identity. The series is inspired by the desire to reformulate the Western stereotype of feminine beauty today. I use the faces of black women and place them in a universe where they are the new goddesses of beauty. The faces I take belong to images that break with the canon of Western beauty. I place these women in a mystical and ideal universe where their bodies are interwoven with dissimilar objects and abstract forms that give them a symbolic meaning similar to divinities or goddesses. In my work they are surrounded by the opulence of gold and the energy of yellow; symbols of power. My protagonists are composed of a kind of armor that protects and empowers them. They are collages that seek to be sensorially attractive and seductive. I want these works to have a captivating sense in order to formulate the image of a new woman. My intention is that this new type of woman-goddess that I propose will incite the acceptance of a different canon of beauty. This series celebrates the various ethnic components that are part of human beings, but also, of the historical, political, social and cultural reality that surrounds us in Cuba. With my work I seek to support the Afro-descendant movement in my country, a movement to which I belong and with which I identify.

Dayani Muñoz Reguera (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1994) lives and works in Havana. She studied a degree in Theater Art in the Specialty of Scenic Design at the University of the Arts (ISA), Havana, Cuba (2014-2019). Muñoz has worked as a scenery and costume designer at the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV). She also works as an art director on music videos. She participated in the important illustration project: “The Creative Pixel Project” (2020). Intervention – Mural. Montreal headquarters. Canada; and was finalist in the Photography Contest “Creative Photo Siena Award” (2020) Siena, Italy. Her digital graphic work uses collage as the main procedure. The collage becomes her main tool to discuss from the experimentation on topics of a deep self-referential content based on the gender discourse. According to the artist, she is “interested in the recycling of images that have apparently lost their function or have been pigeonholed into a single form or sense, in order to give them new meanings and to build a different reality. My proposals are based on processes, concerns and personal experiences through which I discourse on existential, psychological and social issues of the human being. My works are composed of fragments, pieces of reality that I interpret through me, in a constant search for identity.