Modestycore: A Bimbo Oil Heiresses Story
“Modestycore” is a video performance piece that explores the politics of sensuality, purity, shame, and self-preservation. It doesn’t work to prove or disprove the values of modesty, it explores the in-between space between revealing and concealing. The video follows the headless heiress of an oil empire. While her headless family extracts resources, ruins ecosystems, and destabilizes local fishing communities, she just wants to talk about her outfits. She pontificates upon her obsession with sexiness and aesthetics. One might call her a bimbo with nuance. Her vanity is her saving grace as it allows her to empathize with others also struggling with how they present to the world. Things become more complicated when we are introduced to her occult object that hosts the soul of ‘“Deadman”, performed by Youtuber DeadManAnimations. Deadman teaches her about code-switching and cloaking through what appears to be snippets of conversations from the trapped man’s life. He touches on topics such as the survival technique of code-switching under settler colonialism and global capitalism. Through these conversations, her ideas about cloaking and modesty are recontextualized. She is, however, still an oil heiress and will never fully understand the power she wields.
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Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based new media artist. Working in video, installation, and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay, and performative personas. Maya is currently trying to become famous on Youtube by combining the “normie” appeal of video essays with surrealist performance art.
DeadMan is an African-American (or "New Afrikan") organizer and propagandist from Southern California, he makes surrealist educational videos, music videos, and animations on YouTube. His artwork draws influences from various subcultures such as death metal, 140 culture occultism, focusing on Pan-Africanism, Anti-Colonialism, Racism, Queer Liberation, and Satanism.
