Cosmeticized spaces : on the altar-installations works of Patssi Valdez, 1990-1996

This thesis concentrates on the installation works of multimedia artist Patssi Valdez (born 1951 in East Los Angeles), focusing specifically on the site-specific altar-installations she created between 1990 and 1996. In these large-scale, multimedia works, Valdez employs an artistic technique that follows the tradition of altar-making to construct spaces that extend her meditations on self-fashioning and style beyond the corporeal. Through a myriad of secular, everyday objects as well as sacred Catholic symbols and popular Mexican iconography, Valdez was able to explore alternative avenues of expressing style and cultivating aesthetics. A critical concept in Valdez’s altar-installations is the cosmeticization of space as an artistic practice, or the aesthetic transformation of a physical/material space. Cosmeticization is intrinsically linked to, and emerges from, Valdez’s experience as a professional cosmetologist and from her time as a set and costume designer for Chicano theater and film.