“I was born naked, and the rest of my life has been adorned and glamorized to performance.”
Presented by DMST Atelier, Lustered Performance is a solo exhibition by Marilyn Garcia featuring oil paintings, photography, and mixed-media works made between 2025 and 2026. Through self-portraiture and recurring motifs, Garcia explores identity not as something discovered but as something inherited, assembled, and continually rehearsed.
The exhibition’s title refers to the polished performances that define everyday life. To luster is to polish, embellish, and make radiant. Performance, in Garcia’s practice, extends beyond the stage or theatrical act. It describes the unconscious rituals, the ways we learn to inhabit our bodies, perform femininity, navigate cultural expectations, and present ourselves to the world, through which identity is ultimately constructed.
Throughout the exhibition, Garcia approaches self-portraiture not as autobiography but as performance. Her body becomes a character capable of carrying ideas beyond individual experience. Removed from conventional portraiture, the figure shifts from representing a single person to becoming a site where emotion, memory, and social expectation intersect. By distancing the body from biography, Garcia creates space for viewers to project their own experiences onto the work, allowing personal narratives, conscious and unconscious, to merge with collective ones.
Rather than presenting identity as fixed, Lustered Performance understands it as an ongoing process of becoming. Garcia’s paintings and mixed-media works do not ask viewers to uncover an authentic self beneath performances; rather, they ask them to consider whether such a self has ever existed outside of them.
