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€"Wax”, part the video series ”Life Hacks”, reframes the common (female) beauty rituals of shaving and waxing body hair, replacing legs, underarms, or bikini lines with a coconut. Wax strips peel away the outer layers of husk, as if preparing for some sort of consumption, but also drawing attention to the gesture itself, a humorous and even aggressive action with little to no useful effect. The by-now ubiquitous term “life hack” is called up, positioning the rituals of vanity as ineffective solutions to problems that we did not know we had.
Anna Rose (b. 1982, Massachusetts, USA) has lived and worked in Florence, Italy since 2004. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Her work spans photography, video, costume and installation with a sensibility towards the relationship between body and environment, entering into conversation with historical, psychological, and cultural mythologies of place.