Expanding Brain, 2018

Painted steel, plywood, formica, acrylic, glazed ceramic, resin, hardware

Solo Show, Southard Reid, London, UK

Titled for a meme made by the artist which anchored the exhibition, this show was a suite of discrete minimal sculptures which interrogated the self and expressed the pressures of conformity and categorization within the art world. In Artist Interview, 2018, exploring self and artistic identity, Cetera presents a confessional style artist interview taking equal inspiration from a recent BBC interview of a female assassin hired by President Duterte of the Philippines, and the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, by Louis Malle. The subject, an autobiographical, yet fictional version of Cetera, physical and vocal characteristics obscured as if protecting her identity from the viewer, appears in a subtitled, single shot Q&A.  The artist responds and reflects on her position towards and within an environment where artists, specifically of colour, are expected to perform their identity, race and gender, finding themselves in trap-like predicaments regarding content. The conversation ebbs and flows between a stream of consciousness monologue and a boilerplate questionnaire to which artists are expected to conform.