• Visit
  • Exhibitions
    • Current
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Close
  • Programs
  • Library
  • Memberships
  • Give
    • Donate to the ICA
    • The David Pace Legacy Fund
    • Close
  • Benefit and Art Auction 2025
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Institute of Contemporary Art San José

A contemporary art museum in downtown San José.

Sense of Self

March 15, 2019 by SJICA

Sense of Self

November 9, 2019 – March 15, 2020

Image above:
Installation view of Sense of Self featuring Marcela Pardo Ariza’s series Kin Skin, 2019 (left) and Jamil Hellu’s series Hues, 2018 (right). Photo credit: David Pace

Opening Reception —
November 17, 2019

Members Preview: 1- 2pm 
Public Reception: 2 – 4pm

A Price List for artwork featured in Sense of Self is available here.

Find news and press coverage on this exhibition here.

Sense of Self features Bay Area photographers who explore identity and selfhood through portraiture.

The photograph can be a tool of empowerment used to reposition the complicated histories of portraiture. Presenting subjects who have been historically excluded and misrepresented reclaims their identities and reinserts them into art discourse. Sense of Self explores identity and selfhood through the photographs of Marcela Pardo Ariza, Tammy Rae Carland, Erica Deeman, Jamil Hellu, and Stephanie Syjuco. Each artist explores deep concepts around identity – including race, queer identity, gender expression, and cultural lineage. Sense of Self celebrates the power of contemporary photographic portraiture to spark empathy, break down barriers, and subvert assumptions.

Jamil Hellu invites members of the LGBTQ+ community to collaborate on portraits that explore queer histories and cultural lineage. Hellu considers the ways his portraits “can express an evolving definition of pride and empowerment while resisting the growing intolerance in our political times.” The series On Becoming presents Tammy Rae Carland as both her father and mother in reimagined family photos, reflecting on the complexities of what we inherit from our parents, and how family photos can present a false constructed narrative. In Carland’s series Lesbian Beds, the imprints of bodies on matresses act as portraits, shedding light on the private domestic realm of non-heteronormative women’s sexuality.

Stephanie Syjuco’s portraits comment on Western constructions of the “exotic” and the problematic history of ethnography. Her series Applicant Photos (Migrants) also discusses the loss of individuality in the way migrants are depicted as a faceless, anonymous mass. Erica Deeman’s Brown series will be presented in an immersive installation that questions insidious assumptions about race, and how we read faces based on our own visual expectations and historic portrayals. Marcela Pardo Ariza has created a new series for Sense of Self as an extension of her 2018 series Kin. Pardo Ariza describes kin in her statement: “It’s anti-geographical, it’s nontopographical. / It’s intersectional, intergenerational, transnational.” This series visualizes Pardo Ariza’s connection to community, that feeling of belonging and recognition of ourselves in others; “kin is what keeps us here.”

Sense of Self is supported by the Fleishhacker Foundation and SVCreates, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara.

Related programs and events

  • First Fridays
    Month, DD - Month, DD YYYY
  • 20 Years of San José Storytelling with Gary Singh and Sal Pizarro
    Month, DD - Month, DD YYYY
  • First Friday: Artist + Curator-Led Tour with Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa
    Month, DD - Month, DD YYYY

Filed Under: Archive Exhibitions

Footer

  • Exhibitions

  • Current
  • Upcoming
  • Past
  • About ICA San José

  • Mission
  • Environmental Sustainability
  • History
  • Staff
  • Board
  • Press Room
  • Note: The ICA cannot accept proposals. Anything that gets sent to us will not be returned.
  • Get Involved

  • Membership
  • Support Us
  • Careers/Internships
  • Visit Us

ICA San José
560 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113 > MAP

   

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required
       
   
   
Copyright © 2025 Institute of Contemporary Art San José